'Enough Said' by Alan Bennett

2nd April 2026

Today, being the last working day this week owing to it being Good Friday tomorrow, I finish in the office somewhat earlier than usual and head into Exeter for a bite to eat. En route from the car park to the Thai restaurant I have selected for my weekly treat, I pass Waterstones and decide to enter with a view to seeing if a book about football written by my brother has yet made it onto the shelves. It hasn’t, as it turns out. But I nonetheless happily browse for half an hour or so and inevitably end up making a purchase or two (in fact three). One of the books I pick up is an attractively presented hardcover called ‘Enough Said’ by the now rather elderly, but still remarkably lush-haired, Alan Bennett, whose cosily familiar features grace its cover. I generally love his work and have a particular soft spot for the volumes of personal diaries he publishes periodically of which this comprises the latest instalment.

3rd April 2026

Easter weekend always brings a certain delight as it affords the opportunity for me to spend a full four days at home with C, H & L catching up with domestic chores while reading quietly on the sofa. This year we have only one social obligation so I am, perhaps, doubly pleased. I pick up Alan Bennett’s diaries and start reading. This volume starts in 2016 when he is eighty-two, but still it seems writing as prolifically as ever. He and his partner Rupert appear to have a lovely relationship and a not altogether unenviable lifestyle – weekdays in London, weekends in Yorkshire – interesting work and not infrequent social contact with a variety of literary and artistic celebrities of the type I am, on the whole, interested in knowing about. I find myself charmed and quickly engrossed. I read several dozen pages before picking up other books I wish to progress with, notably the rather more challenging ‘Woodstock’ by Sir Walter Scott that was published two hundred years ago this month. I reflect somewhat dolefully on the fact that I have now been alive for over a quarter of that time. Alan B, of course, has been around for nearly half of it.

4th April 2026

Oh dear. Alan B seems to have been terribly upset back in 2016 with the result of the Brexit referendum. There is a good deal of invective about the leading campaigners in the ‘leave campaign’, but I note that it really seems to be all Conservatives that he despises, irrespective of their views on the European Union. Within a few pages he remarks that he considers Jeremy Hunt really to be a ‘cunt’, and David Cameron too. He also keeps singing the praises of former Speaker, John Bercow, whose preparedness to abandon political neutrality and break his promise to retire after a decade in order conspire against the referendum result was deplorable. I fear that I would have to keep very quiet about political matters if ever I was to have the good fortune actually to meet AB in person.

5th April 2026

Easter Sunday is light well into the evening thanks to the clocks advancing an hour last weekend. Birdsong is much more noticeable in the garden. I am able to spend pretty well the whole day with my head buried in various books. One is the last novel published by J. B. Priestley prior to his death in 1984. It is not at all well known and was never, it would seem, issued in paperback. It is called ‘Found Lost Found, or the English Way of Life’. There are, it seems to me, a number of similarities between J B and AB, the latter in many ways having assumed a similar position in English national life after the passing of the former. AB also occupies a place in our affections once amply filled Sir John Betjeman. Who will take up this mantle next? Simon Armitage could, to an extent, I suppose, or Richard Coles. Adam Buxton has some of the same qualities as do Frank Cotterell-Boyce and Miranda Hart, though in truth one is hard put to think of anyone who quite fits the bill, or ever could, which may be the point.

6th April 2026

Another bank holiday, but I am back at my desk today. I pick up the Bennett diaries again in the evening and find myself getting increasingly irritated with some of what he says. I appreciate his honesty in writing and publishing what he really thinks, but as I read I find that I am increasingly alienated, which is a matter of sadness as I have always considered myself a serious admirer. At one point he makes a silly observation abhorring the fact that the England cricketer Ben Stokes celebrates taking a wicket by raising his arms above his head and assuming a kneeling position, while apparently in AB’s perception ‘snarling’. He clearly watches very little international cricket and thus fails to appreciate – I suspect knowingly – that almost all bowlers do this when a crucial wicket is taken. There is nothing especially English or ugly about the Stokes celebrations, yet AB claims that there is. He appears to be becoming a representative of the type of intellectual George Orwell so accurately characterised as perceiving ‘something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman’ and having a tendency to ‘snigger at every English institution’ while taking ‘their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow’. Nowadays, of course, it is Brussels that they look to for a political lead, or Havana sometimes. This saddens me, but other remarks he makes in these diaries tend to confirm the impression.

7th April

I read more of AB’s diaries in bed and enjoy doing so. His ability to make me laugh and cry at the same time is really second to none. He has done this with terrific skill throughout his career, but here does so in respect of his own life, which makes it all the more poignant. His health problems multiply as he ages. His sight, teeth, hearing, bowel control mechanism, mobility and heart gradually deteriorate. He gives a pretty full account of his many hospital visits and periods of recovery, the humiliations and restrictions, but never gives in to self-pity. He just carries on living and working, noting amusing incidents such as mishearing things. Hardly a week goes by without one of his friends or acquaintances dying. He is forever attending funerals and memorial services, but writes about them quite cheerfully, summing up the life of each lost person in a few beautifully-written, thoughtful lines. The passages about Jonathan Miller’s advancing dementia are hard to read when one considers the size of that brain, his extraordinary eloquence and range of intellect. But AB writes about old age in the most endearing manner and I can’t help but want him just to keep on going for as long as possible.

More Brexit nonsense. At last on page 163, after previously doing little more than hurling the usual tedious remainer insults about, he briefly sets out why he is so opposed to the UK leaving the EU:

It’s nothing to do with the economic consequences of the pull-out, which are debatable to say the least. But all across Europe the forces of the far right are gathering strength. This is so in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Germany and France and even in what one had always thought of as sensible countries of Europe, Holland and Denmark. They are bringing with them intolerance, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, as often as not disguised as common sense.

With all our shortcomings we are still a liberal society and if there is to be a struggle with the far right our place is alongside the liberal and social democratic parties in Europe. The flight to Brexit is still being presented as courageous. It isn’t. It’s cowardice.

I am genuinely baffled, though this may simply be a failure on my part to follow the argument. Is this really the best he can do by way of justification for his clearly genuine abhorrence of the 2016 referendum result? There is surely nothing remotely incompatible between the UK asserting its political independence and also asserting proud liberalism. Being in the EU, as we see from so many countries, does nothing whatever to prevent the rise of far right parties. Indeed, in giving them a grievance, it probably serves to enhance their electoral appeal. AB’s view makes no sense to me at all. I fear that it is no more or less than an expression of intolerant tribal politics of a kind I hope he would eschew. Later he remarks that ‘a plebiscite is not a democracy’. But of course that is exactly what it is when a fairly and constitutionally elected Parliament decides to hold one. I doubt – in fact I know – that he would not have made that remark had the remain side won in 2016.

It would seem, at least from this diary, that AB largely mixes socially with the same kind of people. North London-based cosmopolitan, metropolitan, metrosexual, Guardian-reading, artistic types. His range of acquaintance – or at least close acquaintance - is remarkably narrow for someone who writes with such insight about a far wider range of people. His tribe is just not my tribe. It is strange because he is also able to write with extraordinary sympathy and insight, it would seem, about less privileged English people of an ilk that he does not appear to have close contact with. May be this is because he was, by his own admission, at one time a religious conservative. Moreover of course his upbringing was anything but favoured. So he is presumably writing from memory about types he no longer has so much to do with, but once very much did. I can think of no other sound explanation for the apparent paradox.

8th April

I am enjoying the Bennet diaries more and more as I proceed. It is very much the kind of book I just don’t want to end – not unlike the wonderful Shaun Bethell book shop diaries, which AB discusses reading and enjoying here too. Indeed one of the joys is reading about AB’s own reading, which is extensive and very much the kind I enjoy; much more non-fiction than fiction though. I find myself jotting down the names of authors and titles with a view to reading them myself.

I am also very much enjoying his reflections on his own long life. He has written a lot about his parents and his childhood before, so I am quite familiar with that part of his life. But much less so about his time in the army doing National Service where he learned Russian, and very much less about his time as a young Oxford don at Magdalen College before his performing and writing career took off thanks to ‘Beyond the Fringe’. His has been a fascinating life that will no doubt one day form the basis of an extremely interesting biography. I suspect he is perhaps more limited in what he reveals than one might suppose and that there is much more to him behind the somewhat irresistible and endearing persona that he has so skilfully presented to the world these past seventy years. Might the apparent sympathetic treatment in his writing of Soviet spies and teenager-molesting teachers one day lead to a reversal of his reputation? Cancellation even? I hope not, but could easily see that happening if some hostile journalist on the make ever decided to try and bring him down.

9th April

In Alan Bennett’s diaries there are, as one might expect, frequent allusions to his play ‘The History Boys’. First aired at the National Theatre in 2004, it then decamped, like one of the overachieving pupils it portrays, to Broadway. It appears to have been industriously touring ever since, reluctant, as it were yet, ever quite to leave the exam hall. There followed a very good film and, if I recall rightly, a radio version too, allowing fans such as myself to encounter the compelling group of characters AB created in almost any medium short of semaphore. It is, by any measure, one of his more eminent works, and for me has always held a particular fascination, not least because of its setting: a grammar school in Sheffield in 1983, where eight boys are being coaxed, chivvied and occasionally bewildered into readiness for Oxford or Cambridge entrance, with a view to reading history.

At the time, I was at a school of much the same stamp (King Edwards School in Birmingham), and would, by 1984, find myself in precisely the same anxious queue, polishing essays and rehearsing answers in the hope of appearing sufficiently well-read and astute to study history at Oxford.

Watching the play (and later the film) thus had an unsettling familiarity, rather like overhearing one’s own adolescence being quoted back at one with improved punctuation. The scenes in which a master insists that only French be spoken in his classroom were especially evocative. We had such a man too. He also bore, albeit in a much diminished and far more brutal manner, a resemblance to Richard Griffiths, who played the role both on stage and screen.

Bennett himself, of course, had been one of these ‘history boys’ some thirty years earlier, and one senses that much in the play is drawn from memory, or at least from memory tidied up and given better lines. In my view it captures about eighty per cent of the period with admirable precision - the anxieties, the ambitions, the curious mix of bravado and bafflement. The remaining twenty per cent, however, is where things drift into something a little more wishful. The treatment of sexuality feels less like reportage and more like aspiration. In the school I knew, such matters were still firmly unspoken, filed away with other things not to be mentioned in polite company. The idea of boys ‘coming out’ would have been met with blank incomprehension, and the notion of flirtation between pupils and masters would have belonged firmly to the realm of fantasy. One suspects that here Bennett was not so much recalling the world as it was, but quietly sketching the one he might have preferred to have existed.

10th April

I finish AB’s wonderful diaries tonight. They take him to the end of 2024, well past his ninetieth birthday. And still he keeps on working, producing what he refers to as ‘stuff’ of the very highest quality. For much of this diary he discusses first conceiving, then writing and finally observing the production of a film called ‘Choral’, which to my astonishment I find I have not heard of. It was apparently in cinemas recently. It is set in the First World War and tells the story of a choral society in a Yorkshire town putting on one of the earliest performances of Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’. So I download it from Amazon Prime and think it fantastic. The rather unpleasant portrayal of Sir Edward himself seems, perhaps, a little over the top, but it serves the plot well.

I find myself reflecting on why I admire and enjoy AB’s work so much. It is partly I suppose its old fashioned character. This is not the kind of film that generally gets made nowadays, being understated, character-driven and lacking glamour as it does. But it is also I think because AB, unlike most writers, does not seek to avoid nostalgia, nor sentimentality. This film is, in a sense, drenched in them and is all the better for it. There is plenty there that is not sentimental too, of course. The England portrayed here is by no means sugar coated, far from it. Plenty of uncomfortable truths are told too as he sets out to disrupt and subvert our customary national narrative. It is, I think, this combination which makes AB’s work so compelling and admirable, as well of course has is sheer skill as a dramatist.

Towards the end of the diary he makes this remark:

I can say I love London, I can say I love England. I can’t say I love my country because I don’t know what that means.

If that is really true, it is both revealing and something that surely sets AB apart from most of us. I think it may be something to feel sorry for him about.

His is, it seems to me, a voice quite unlike any other - immediately recognisable without ever being showy, and all the more persuasive for that. AB manages to be compelling largely because he never appears to be trying to compel at all. There is in his writing a kind of diffidence, a reluctance to make a fuss, coupled with an honesty about his own shortcomings that feels less like confession and more like tidying up in public. One warms to him not in spite of this, but because of it. In an age where many celebrities, including those with literary pretensions, seem determined to announce themselves at volume, his quieter, self-effacing presence comes as a most welcome antidote. One can only hope he goes on a little longer yet, notebook in hand, still noticing, still muttering, still putting things down with that deceptively simple clarity. It would be a pity if it were all now to conclude with this valedictory ‘enough said’, however characteristic that might be. One suspects, and hopes, that he has not quite finished saying things that could do with being said.