Description

20 September. Have a notion for a radio series – Awkward Conversations.

Enough Said is Alan Bennett’s fourth collection of diaries and prose. Covering the turbulent years 2016 to 2024, the diaries take us through lockdown, Brexit, the reign of Johnson, the rise of Trump and the death of the Queen. In between, we take the train with him back and forth to Yorkshire, celebrate the herons, the newts and the street fairs, and lament the scarcity of curlews, the closure of the last local bank and the deteriorating welfare state. There is the premiere of Allelujah!, the revived Talking Heads, the publication of two Sunday Times bestsellers and the filming of The Choral.

2024 is the year that Alan turns ninety; he reflects on old age and the importance of luck. He looks back to childhood and recalls an idyllic wartime month as an evacuee. A book for the bedside, this is poignant, funny, contemplative Alan Bennett, as he records life both personal and political in his most distinct of voices.

Publisher Review

Praise for Killing Time: Full of wit and style * Observer * Nobody does it like [Bennett] . . . his sentences remain as devastatingly, casually precise as ever * Guardian * Bennett, with his gentle narrative voice, has lulled us into a story that takes the scandalous tragedy of care home deaths from Covid-19 as its true subject * Financial Times * So accustomed are we now to Bennett’s prose that it takes a mental leap to notice just how good he is, how finely tuned his sentences, the microscopic power of his observation * iNews *