Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
ALAN BENNETTAbove literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
ALAN BENNETT






