And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
ALAN BENNETTI turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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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.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
ALAN BENNETT






