Writing Home

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Random House, 1995 - 417 páginas
Writing Home is an eclectic memoir that includes work from Bennett's entire career. Here are selections from his occasional diaries, covering 1980-1990, which have appeared in The London Review of Books, the journal he kept during the production of his first play, Forty Years On, which starred John Gielgud; and accounts of the filming of his television plays. In prefaces, reviews, memorial addresses, and essays, he discusses actors and literary figures such as John Osborne, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and Franz Kafka. And at the center of the book is "The Lady in the Van", the riotously funny and poignant story of an irascible London eccentric, Miss Shepherd, who parked herself in a trailer in Bennett's garden for fifteen years, becoming simultaneously a considerable burden and an important fixture in his life. (One diary entry reads, "I ask her if she would like a cup of coffee. 'Well, I wouldn't want you to go to all that trouble. I'll just have half a cup.'"). Through Writing Home runs Bennett's unmistakable strain of self-effacing, wry humor and his faultless observation of the perils of personal and social interaction - none of it ever less than outstandingly entertaining. Still, as Bennett brings his considerable wit and intelligence to bear on his artistic environs, "Little England", and Thatcherism, he remains his own lead character. He never spares himself the sometimes withering scrutiny to which he subjects everything he encounters, and thus brings us a tantalizing portrait of the public artist and the private man that makes for a memorable and highly rewarding reading experience.

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Acerca del autor (1995)

Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, West Yorkshire. He decided to apply for a scholarship at Oxford University. He was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford from which he graduated with a first-class degree in history. He was born on May 9, 1934; he is an English author, actor, humorist and playwright. Bennett was made an Honorary Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford in 1987. He was also awarded a D.Litt by the University of Leeds in 1990 and an Hon. PhD from Kingston in 1996. In October 2008 Bennett announced that he was donating his entire archive of working papers, unpublished manuscripts, diaries and books to the Bodleian Library free of charge, as a gesture of thanks and repaying a debt he felt he owed to the UK's social welfare system that had given him educational opportunities which his humble family background would otherwise never have afforded. In 2015 his title, Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin: An Anthology by Alan Bennett, made The New Zealand Best Seller List. He also made the list in 2016 with his title The Lady in the Van.

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