Untold Stories [Paperback]

Alan Bennett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 2007

An instant bestseller in the U.K., Untold Stories brings together the finest and funniest writing by one of England's best-known literary figures. In his first major collection since Writing Home, Alan Bennett opens with a poignant memoir of growing up in Leeds and closes with an account of his cancer diagnosis and recovery, with everything from his much-celebrated essays to his irreverent comic pieces and reviews in between.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bennett has been known to British audiences of radio, television, stage and screen for decades. In the United States, he's best known as the screenwriter of The Madness of King George and, perhaps, for his experiences with Miss Shepherd, an indigent woman who set up a succession of vans in his front yard for 15 years. Now he returns with a shaggy collection of autobiographical sketches, diary entries, considerations of art, architecture and other authors, as well as an account of his bout with colon cancer. Returning to the precincts of his straitlaced, working-class British background, Bennett reveals a lost world whose influence and mores have trailed him his entire life. He revisits the Leeds that he knew in the 1940s, where he was first exposed to music and theater, and where his parents, both shy and retiring people, set lack of pretension as the highest value. While he plays the old crank who is put upon by the world as it is, Bennett reveals an eye for detail and a feel for the complexity of human interactions. And though he laments at length his own late maturation—physical, sexual and intellectual—and lack of sophistication, he shows himself to have achieved a measure of happiness. B&w photos. (Apr.)
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Review

"Surprising, funny, and deeply affecting . . . [Alan Bennett] is a prose stylist of disarming grace and sly humor."--The New York Times Book Review

 

"Untold Stories is intelligent, educated, engaging, humane, self-aware, cantankerous, and irresistibly funny. You want it to go on forever."--The Sunday Times (London)
 
"Painfully intimate, stoically comic . . . Bennett's deadpan, self-deprecating humor translates perfectly."--David Gates, O, The Oprah Magazine
 
"A great achievement and a book of lasting value."--The Guardian (U.K.)
 
"A masterpiece of reminiscence. There is probably no other distinguished English man of letters more instantly likable than Bennett."--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

 

"It is a glaring example of modern English frivolity that [Bennett] is not simply regarded--with awe and terror--as one of the greatest living English writers. . . . If you want to understand the cultural wars in England now, and if you want to come to grips with a great writer and a challenging mind, then Bennett is your man."--The Nation

 

"While he plays the old crank who is put upon by the world as it is, Bennett reveals an eye for detail and a feel for the complexity of human interactions."--Publishers Weekly
 
"[Bennett] is a fine storyteller. . . . His memories of fellow actors Peter Cook and Dudly Moore are wry, witty, and honest."--Library Journal

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 704 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (March 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312426623
• ISBN-13: 978-0312426620
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #299,720 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alan Bennett is a renowned playwright and essayist, a succession of whose plays have been staged at the Royal National Theatre and whose screenplay for The Madness of King George was nominated for an Academy Award. He made his first stage appearance with Beyond the Fringe and his latest play was The Lady in the Van with Maggie Smith. Episodes from his award-winning Talking Heads series have been shown on PBS. His first novel, The Clothes They Stood Up In, was published in 2000. He lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Beyond the Fringe, April 9, 2006

By 

D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Untold Stories (Hardcover)

It's a collection of reminiscences and essays that, taken together, form an autobiography of Alan Bennett. The account of his Yorkshire childhood and family is at the beginning, and that of his bout with colon cancer at the end, but the cobbling together is slightly random, so that some pieces are just tipped in anywhere, and there are occasional verbatim repetitions of quite long passages. I wouldn't recommend starting at page one and reading through the whole six hundred and fifty-three pages but it's addictive to dip into.

Many of the references to the British theatrical and television scene will be mysterious to Americans. A short test follows on which you may allocate yourself scores as a potential reader:

Lived in Britain before 1970 (6 points)

From Yorkshire (3 points)

Gay (1 points)

Interested in one of the following:

Good writing (3 points)

Beyond the Fringe , Monty Python, and the 1960's English satirists (3 points)

Treatment of depression.(1 point)

Treatment of cancer (1 point)

London theater (3 points)

Painting (1 point)

Old English churches (3 points)

Dealing with the homeless (3 points).

Anyone with a score of 9 or more should read it.

He is opinionated, with left-wing but often reactionary views. His account of the social changes in Britain over the last fifty years is perceptive and informative. (Some of the ground in the Beyond the Fringe etc reminiscences is covered by Humphrey Carpenter's "Great Silly Grin.") He's very humble and self effacing (but manages, in the nicest most modest way, to drop in stuff about his Oxford scholarship and first class degree, and being offered a knighthood, and how the Prince of Wales liked his play). At the end I felt quite brash and materialistic and arrogant.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent story teller, March 19, 2006

By 

Elizabeth R. Ash (Toronto Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Untold Stories (Hardcover)

Alan Bennett has had a wonderful life. Educated at Oxford as a scholarship boy,he became a medieval scholar, a part of a leading Broadway revue," Beyond the Fringe," an actor, world class playwright and author, He mixes with the rich and famous and yet he is full of insecurities, shy, uncertain about his sexuality , worried about his late maturity,and even questions his talent. The book is stories from different stages of his life written with painful frankness and such humour that you laugh out loud, and yet you wonder about a man who always takes sandwiches on trips, and travels economy class, when he can own a million pound home in London. He seems haunted by his childhood in working class Yorkshire and he brings his Mam and Dad and the rest of the family to life just as much as the more famous names of his adult days. Mr Bennett is never boring never dull. It is hard to put this book down.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Conversations with a friend., January 3, 2007

By 

R. K. Dillon "Arkay" (Brooklyn,, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Untold Stories (Hardcover)

I gobbled this book down. It was better than a box of chocolates. For 3 nights I sat on my couch & felt as if I were having a dialogue with a particularly entertaining companion.