Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett
Alan Bennettis an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. He was born in Leeds and attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth9 May 1934
address audience boys break history prose reader sit suddenly talk turn
I always like to break out and address the audience. In 'The History Boys', for instance, without any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up.
boys men names
We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place. Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale....Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this, culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, "And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?
teacher boys trying
One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
school boys oxford
My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
mail papers people
Papers like the Mail make out that people are prurient and outraged; I don't think people really care.
courage good means ought says scaring taken writes
He says some things which are taken as gospel, when they ought to be disputed. When he writes 'Courage is no good / It means not scaring others', you want to say that just isn't true. There is more to courage than that.
life people public quite
I can't complain that I've had a public all through my writing life, but people don't quite know what I've written. People don't read you too closely. Perhaps, after I've died, they'll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there's more in it. That may be wrong, but that's what I comfort myself with.
impersonal nowhere shirt shorts summers tried unable
Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease, even, so that if I start off undressed, I have nowhere to go.
I'm more socialist certainly than New Labour - I'm very old Labour, really.
local
I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
apart classics life somehow
I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.
career finding life lucky share
I've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.
I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.
love romantic
Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.