OBJECT OF AFFECTION

At 91, Alan Bennett remains wonderful company in his latest collection of diaries, still skewering British institutions with the same sharp eye he trains on himself

- Nick Curtis

Musing with typically downbeat Yorkshire wit on what it is like to be a national treasure, Alan Bennett once said: “If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel Prize.”

Well, here he is at 91, serving up Enough Said, another edited volume of his punctiliously kept and endlessly diverting diaries, these covering the years 2016 to 2024, and thus the pandemic, the rise of populism, and the likely last spurt of his formidable creative output (the play Allelujah!; the film The Choral; the novella Killing Time).

The general mood of the book is one of diminution, particularly in fitness and faculties, as deafness, cataracts and other medical problems intrude. There’s an apologetic note in April 2019, explaining that several weeks of entries have been “sporadic and often unreadable” following open-heart surgery, after which (he adds later) “my torso looks like the map of a much disputed corner of eighteenth-century Poland”.

After several falls and accidents, he gives up the bike on which he used to potter around Primrose Hill, and needs a wheelchair when getting the train to his Yorkshire cottage (originally his parents’ retirement home) with his partner of over 30 years, Rupert Thomas. When the first Covid lockdown comes it is “scarcely a disruption” for Bennett.

Unassuageably revolted by Brexit and Boris Johnson (and don’t even get him started on Donald Trump), he’s lived to see the tolerant, supportive England – that allowed a butcher’s son like him to flourish – dwindle, its libraries closing and its churches unappreciated, its education system monetised and its sportsmen, Tom Daley aside, horribly vulgar. (Devoutly religious as a teenager, Bennett describes himself now as a “lapsed Anglican”.)