Keeping On Keeping On: (Main)
Hardback
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Alan Bennett's third collection of prose Keeping On Keeping On follows in the footsteps of the phenomenally successful Writing Home and Untold Stories, each published ten years apart. This latest collection contains Bennett's peerless diaries 2005 to 2015, reflecting on a decade that saw four premieres at the National Theatre (The Habit of Art, People, Hymn and Cocktail Sticks), a West End double-bill transfer, and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van.
There's a provocative sermon on private education given before the University at King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and 'Baffled at a Bookcase' offers a passionate defence of the public library. The book includes Denmark Hill, a darkly comic radio play set in suburban south London, as well as Bennett's reflections on a quarter of a century's collaboration with Nicholas Hytner. This is an engaging, humane, sharp, funny and unforgettable record of life according to the inimitable Alan Bennett.
Read an Extract from Keeping On Keeping On by Alan Bennett
5 November 2005, Yorkshire.
I have failed on several occasions to order in more coal with the result that the coal shed is almost empty, with piled against the back wall a large heap of slack wet coal dust well mixed in among it a lot of small coal and the occasional large cob. I sieve this out, saving the burnable coal and putting the coal dust into (extremely heavy) sacks. I wish the village still had its bonfire on the recreation ground as it could have gone straight on the pile.
But it reminds me how when stocks of coal were low during the war we used to sift the coal dust then and how for some (though not in Armley) that was their living, scratting on slag heaps for occasional cobs of coal which they would pile in an old pram and wheel home.
Just after the war, it must have been early in 1946 when we were living at Grandma's, Aunty Myra, Gordon and me went with a pram to a place down Armley Road where we queued for logs which we pushed back up over past Armley Gaol and down to Gilpin Place.
All these thoughts going through my head this Saturday afternoon as I sift the coal in the shed and sweep it out, and so pleased am I by the emptiness of it, and by the fact that I have cleaned up thirty years? accumulation of slack that I go back two or three times to admire my handiwork. Once, I suppose, it would have been an opportunity to whitewash it.
About the Author
More Details
- Contributor: Alan Bennett
- Imprint: Profile Faber
- ISBN13: 9781781256497
- Number of Pages: 736
- Packaged Dimensions: 152x236x60mm
- Packaged Weight: 1280
- Format: Hardback
- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Release Date: 2016-10-20
- Binding: Hardback
- Biography: Alan Bennett has been one of our leading dramatists since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for the stage.One of the National Theatre's most successful productions ever, The History Boys won numerous awards including Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards for Best Play, an Olivier for the Best New Play and the South Bank Award. His collection of prose Writing Home was a number one bestseller. Untold Stories won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography, 2006. Recent works of fiction are The Uncommon Reader and Smut: Two Unseemly Stories. The film of The Lady in the Van starring Maggie Smith was released in 2015, and a new edition of his book of the same name a #1 bestseller for nine weeks.
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