And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
ALAN BENNETTI suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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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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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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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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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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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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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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