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£10.00
We have a choir and on special occasions a glass of dry sherry. It’s less of a home and more of a club and very much a community. Presided over by the lofty Mrs McBryde, Hill Topp House is a superior council home for the elderly. Among the unforgettable cast of staff and residents there’s Mr Peckover the deluded archaeologist, Phyllis the knitter, Mr Cresswell the ex-cruise ship hairdresser, the enterprising Mrs Foss and Mr Jimson the chiropodist. Covid is the cause of fatalities and the source of darkly comic confusion, but it’s also the key to liberation. As staff are hospitalised, protocol breaks down. Miss Rathbone reveals a lifelong secret, and the surviving residents seize their moment, arthritis allowing, to scamper freely in the warmth of the summer sun. ‘Violet? She’ll be having a little lie down,’ said Mrs McBryde. ‘She likes to give her pacemaker a rest. I’ll rout her out.’
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£12.99
’20 August. It’s one of my life’s regrets that I have never kept a donkey.’ Alan Bennett’s 1983 diary was the first that he published in the London Review of Books, though by then he’d already been keeping one for about ten years. ‘Besides the occasional incident that seems worth recording,’ he wrote, ‘I put down gossip and notes on work and reading.’ This modest model has remained intact right up to the present, as Bennett has ascended to ever higher planes of national admiration and affection, and his much-loved LRB diary entries – which have come to be seen as a sort of alternative Queen’s Speech – approach their ruby jubilee. This week-to-view diary for 2023, illustrated by Jon McNaught and equipped with a clutch of useful features, contains a celebratory selection of some of his most immortal anecdotes and observations.
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£8.99
4 March. HMQ pictured in the paper at an investiture wearing gloves, presumably as a precaution against Coronavirus. But not just gloves; these are almost gauntlets. I hope they’re not the thin end of a precautionary wedge lest Her Majesty end up swathed in protective get-up such as is worn at the average crime scene. 20 March. With Rupert now working from home my life is much easier, as I get regular cups of tea and a lovely hot lunch. A year in and out of lockdown as experienced by Alan Bennett. The diary takes us from the filming of Talking Heads to thoughts on Boris Johnson, from his father’s short-lived craze for family fishing trips, to stair lifts, junk shops of old, having a haircut, and encounters on the local park bench.
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£7.99
What would happen if the Queen became a reader of taste and discernment rather than of Dick Francis? The answer is a perfect story. ‘The Uncommon Reader’ is none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace.
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£9.99
Alan Bennett’s third collection of prose ‘Keeping On Keeping On’ follows in the footsteps of the phenomenally successful ‘Writing Home’ and ‘Untold Stories’, each published 10 years apart. This latest collection contains Bennett’s peerless diaries 2005 to 2015, reflecting on a decade that saw four premieres at the National Theatre, a West End double-bill transfer and the films of ‘The History Boys’ and ‘The Lady in the Van’.
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£25.00
Alan Bennett’s third collection of prose ‘Keeping On Keeping On’ follows in the footsteps of the phenomenally successfully ‘Writing Home’ and ‘Untold Stories’, each published ten years apart. The latest collection contains Bennett’s peerless diaries 2005 to 2015, reflecting on a decade that saw four premieres at the National Theatre, a West End double-bill transfer, and the films of ‘The History Boys’ and ‘The Lady in the Van’.
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£9.99
Alan Bennett’s selection of English verse by his favourite poets, accompanied by his own enlivening commentary.
Uh-oh! Rabbit 
