The most one can hope from a reader is that he or she should think: “Here is somebody who knows what it is like to be me.” It’s not what EM Forster meant by “only connect”, but it’s what I mean. Whately, as care minister, warned that restrictions on visitors to care homes at the time were “inhumane”. As a banana-a-day muncher, I admit I was intrigued by a fact box called “Think you know bananas?” in Alex Renton’s entertaining 13 Foods That Shape Our World: How Hunger has Changed the Past, Present and Future (BBC Books). Turns out, I’ve been yellow-bellied in my fruit adventures, never having even tried any of the thousand varieties that are neither yellow nor even banana flavoured. The silk or tundan type, for example, grown in west Africa, has a tangy hint of apple. The most intriguing-sounding variety, though, is a red one that has “a faint raspberry flavour”. I bet that causes a few slip-ups in blind tastings.

House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries by Alan Bennett | Goodreads

An abiding memory for me is his engaging encounter with a leaf sweeper which puts a smile on AB’s face for the rest of the day. His one regret: he’d forgotten to put his hearing aid in! May. Remember as a child at Halliday Place in Armley when Dad was rubbing his face with a (sometimes) ill-smelling towel his face used to squeak. Nicola Sturgeon has insisted she has “nothing to hide” but repeatedly refused to say whether she deleted messages sought by the UK Covid inquiry. The former first minister was challenged over reports that she destroyed communications that have been requested by the investigation. The Scottish... Nicola Sturgeon has insisted she has “nothing to hide” but repeatedly refused to say whether she deleted messages sought by the UK Covid inquiry. The former first minister was challenged over reports that she destroyed communications that have been requested by the investigation. The Scottish... Nicola Sturgeon has insisted she has “nothing to hide” but repeatedly refused to say whether she deleted messages sought by the... Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth One phone call today, a woman inquiring if I’ve made arrangements for my funeral yet. At least it isn’t a recorded voice.

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. Literary figures played a key role in some of the songs of Radiohead, and Thom Yorke has paid tribute to the inspiration of writers such as Ben Okri. The band were also influenced by Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 science fiction novel Cat’s Cradle when composing their song “Nice Dream”. The Vonnegut link is one of the hundreds of intriguing facts in a new biography of the band, Radiohead: Life in a Glasshouse (Palazzo Editions), written by John Aizlewood, a music expert and editor of Q magazine in its heyday. Covering more than three decades, the book is a must-have for fans of this influential group. It is not all doom and gloom. On 26 March of that first year, Nicholas Hytner rings with the exciting news that the BBC would like to record a new version of Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues of 1988 because it is exactly the sort of thing that could be done on Zoom. The director pops round later that day to discuss details, which he is obliged to semaphore from the other side of the street. Bennett, in turn, worries that weeks of social isolation have robbed him of the power of speech. On the phone to the optician about his broken glasses, he finds that he has lost the words, and his partner has to take over. Later, arriving at the vaccination centre for his first jab, Bennett firmly announces that he is here “for the virus” (in his defence, he points out that both of them are “v words”). 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. There is inevitably family history and talk about life in both Camden Town and Yorkshire, combined with reminiscences of old friends and colleagues adorned by the kind of memorable quotes that would naturally find their way into a commonplace book.

House Arrest - British Theatre Guide Book review: House Arrest - British Theatre Guide

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. For much of 1983 and 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood dominated the pop landscape so totally that... ★★★★✩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 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. Whilst only brief in length, 'House Arrest' does provide a lovely snapshot of what life was like for the aging Alan Bennett through the pandemic, told in a manner that only he can 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. I 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.

House Arrest to The World in 2050 Books of the month: From House Arrest to The World in 2050

Thanks to arthritis I’m now much less mobile than I was. Gone are the days when I could jump on my bike to pop down to the shops, so static semi-isolation is scarcely a hardship or even a disruption of my routine. 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.Spain: Parliamentary ceremony in Madrid to mark the 18th birthday of Crown Princess Leonor of Spain. Pupils in English schools were told to wear face masks despite limited evidence of the policy’s efficacy after Johnson was told by Whitty that it was probably “not worth an argument” with Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, on the issue. The York Theatre Royal’s tour of The Habit of Art, the play about Auden and Britten that did well last year and was due to be revived for a festival in New York, has had to be cancelled. I write to the cast apologising and saying that one person who would not be washing his hands every five minutes is WH Auden. Venice is the only city I’ve been in, with the possible exception of Cambridge, where there was nothing to offend the eye, and going in winter as I did in those days one would find the Piazza San Marco empty. It was at the Accademia with its thin walls that I first overheard sexual intercourse, and the shout of a man coming, ‘Vengo! Vengo!’