However, it added that the saga raised “questions around the conditions on which departing members of government retain and subsequently use official information which need to be considered by organisations such as the Cabinet Office”. She was a great woman, her performance of Let’s Do It at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in Lancaster at the avocado counter. Her Dinnerladies was often sentimental, but she caught in the part of the handyman, played by Duncan Preston, the idiom of an old-fashioned working-class man, elaborate, literate and language-loving, which is, or was, more typical of the north than the more cliched dialect-rich versions. June. When in 2019 I had a flutter with my heart and a momentary loss of speech, it must have been around the time of the stand-off between Boris Johnson and the Supreme Court because the young doctor in A&E at UCH testing my mental capacity asked me what the word was for closing down Parliament, i.e. proroguing, which I got in one.

House Arrest (Pandemic Diaries) Hardcover 5 May 2022

Rishi Sunak told Starmer: “Rather than comment on piecemeal bits of information, I’m sure [Starmer] will agree with me the right way for these things to be looked at is the Covid inquiry. In one of the longest interviews he ever gave, the Friends actor confided that he was ‘a dark soul’ who dreamed of meeting the right woman and starting a family I’ve never been that fond of my hands. Now, much washed as we are told, they scarcely bear looking at: shiny, veinous and as transparent as an anatomical illustration. Far from the matt, solid, sensible instruments one has always hankered after. More “artistic”, I suppose. An old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere. In season the A65 is a busy road, some of the traffic headed to Burnsall and Upper Wharfedale, the rest of it en route for the Lake District. Out of season or in the evening we sometimes turn off to Bolton Abbey. One of the locations for A Private Function. Then on to Draughton where much more recently there would be a vase of flowers always fresh, marking the place of an accident and which Mike Harding made into a poem and was my inspiration for the monologue The Shrine in last year’s Talking Heads. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuthI don’t think Her Majesty ever came to any other of my plays, though not, I’m sure, due to my youthful bêtise. Still, when I next wrote about the queen it might also have caused offence. This was A Question of Attribution, put on at the National Theatre in 1988 and the first time the queen had been represented on the stage. This needs to be said. Prunella Scales’s seamless portrayal of Her Majesty not only preceded, it also surpassed any that came after. Physically much the same as HMQ, Pru had no claim or aspirations to glamour, she even had a touch of the suburban. The sad thing is that only the National Theatre audiences saw and were stunned by this performance. Though John Schlesinger later filmed the play (where HMQ was supported by her corgis) the magic didn’t quite transfer. But Pru was the first and the best. In the central scene of the play the queen has a long conversation with the keeper of the royal pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt. He is a longtime Soviet agent and one of the questions implicit in the scene is whether the queen knows this. Brian Eno has just won the Golden Lion for music at the Venice Biennale, which obliged him to perform with an orchestra. Anyone expecting classical conformity from this boffin of sound, however, hasn’t been paying attention for the past... ★★★★☆ Scottish Business Digest Serica could revive North Sea’s Kyle oil field: 5 need-to-know business stories As an over-70, I am officially exhorted to remain isolated and indoors which is to say that my usual going on now has governmental endorsement. Fiona Gell’s ‘Spring Tides: A Story from a Small Island’ is a passionate, moving account of the transformative power of the sea and the importance of protecting it for the future generations

‘He manages to make me look like a blond Hitler’: Alan

It’s always been assumed that the late queen didn’t much like the theatre, which can’t be said of her successor, who’s often to be found at plays, and if it’s a comedy, far from dampening down an audience, Charles’s presence and his loud laughter help to get them going. March, Yorkshire. We vary our evening stroll, which in my case is more of a trudge, by going up the village to the church to sit in the churchyard. The birds are noisy, rooks and crows mostly, though unlike London no seagulls. And here come the bellringers for their Monday night practice, and quite frail they look too. The key is lost, so the ringers are very happy to chat and gossip while it’s located. Someone with Ukrainian relatives is taking in a family and there has been a dance and coffee morning in aid. Now the church is found to be open so no key is required, the ringers go up the tower as we walk home, and as we are putting the key in our own door the bells start.There is a valedictory feel to these final entries. Rupert no longer edits The World of Interiors, so perhaps they will give up London and stay in Yorkshire? But as long as Bennett keeps writing, it doesn’t really matter. This is a mere fragment, but still precious. He notes being sent a new bio­graphy of Graham Greene, but he wouldn’t read it because he was never a fan. “I’ve been put off by the Catholicism showing through and his frequent ‘rare’ interviews. A ­darling of the Sunday papers in the l960s, he was always said to be retiring while in fact being avid for publicity.” He only met Greene once, when he came to see his play The Old Country, and Alec Guinness introduced them. He remembered that, “Greene’s was the limpest hand I’d ever shaken. Nor did he say a word about the play, for or against.”

House Arrest, Pandemic Diaries by Alan Bennett - Booktopia House Arrest, Pandemic Diaries by Alan Bennett - Booktopia

The scene in question was a pleasure to write. It brought home to me that HMQ (as she was billed in the programme) was a person like no other, a woman who has been everywhere, met everyone and to whom nothing comes as a surprise. At one point Blunt mentions Venice:A very slight book ( I read it on a short bus journey of less than 30 minutes). Although I love Alan Bennett’s diaries I’m not entirely sure that this was deserving of a publication on its own. It’s billed as the Pandemic Diaries but considering, for the best part of two years, we lived with some sort of restriction, Bennett glosses over so much (I don’t know how much of his diaries have been edited down or even if he writes them every day). Although he refused the former honour 25 years ago, given the quality of many recent elevations to the peerage including one bemoaned in this book, the House of Lords could certainly benefit from both his wit and wisdom. January 2022. Sent a brochure for Venice, as we regularly are, in which the Orient Express figures prominently, emphasising the luxury side of the journey (and its huge cost). What it isn’t any more is an adventure. Venice by train used to feel like Life, crossing the Channel and boarding the Paris train at Boulogne, getting a seat in the dining car before going round Paris on the ceinture and finding one’s sleeping car. It was an international train, headed, I think, for Istanbul, but overnight transformed in certain sections into something much more domestic. I went First, thinking, rightly, that this meant luxury, but venturing further down the train one found humbler passengers spilling out into the corridor along with their belongings in bulging cardboard boxes, hens and on one occasion a goat. When one eventually arrived in Venice, where I’d never been, in the late afternoon it did seem like an achievement: one came out of the station to find the canals not sequestered away in some tourist area but there on the steps of the station itself, Venice the only place that lived up to its publicity. On the vaporetto one passed the fire station, the gleaming boats ready arrayed, and that seemed wondrous too, that here even the fire engines were in boat form. Himself no slouch when it came to work, George Steiner once asked a Soviet dissident how he got through so much. “House arrest, Steiner. House arrest.” Alas, so far as work is concerned, I haven’t yet noticed much difference.’