How could you not love Alan Bennett? An institution, a national treasure, a genius. He has lengthily documented his life and if you wish to read his full memoirs then Untold Stories is where to go. We can’t possibly list all his work here but our personal favourite is probably The Uncommon Reader, a brilliant imagining of what would happen when if Queen fell in love with reading; and if you’ve never read Talking Heads then you really should, they’re each tiny masterpieces.
Recommending memoirs and autobiographies is never easy as it does rather depend on ones interest in the subject. So we’re simply going to recommend a handful of great autobiographies and then recommend a couple of writers who if you might want to discover if you don’t already know them.
So, a few other brilliant memoirs by brilliant writers: Moab is My Washpot by Stephen Fry, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, Toast by Nigel Slater. Tragically I was an Only Twin by Peter Cook, Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, Miracles of Life by JG Ballard, Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
One writer we’d particularly like to recommend to Alan Bennett fans is Gervase Finn. An ordinary Yorkshire man who made his living as a schools inspector before turning to writing, he has the warmth, wit and humour of Bennett and his books are a delight. Start with Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill.
And the only other writer we think of in Bennett’s league is the great Michael Frayn. A reasonably close contemporary of Bennett’s (interestingly they both learnt Russian together at Cambridge for National Service as part of what the KGB dubbed ‘Spy School’ – who wouldn’t give a lot of money to hear them reminisce about that?), Frayn’s excellent Spies feels memoir-ish and all his work is worth exploring.
And so our off the wall suggestions are in honour of Bennett’s Russian fluency:
Death and the Penguin by Andrei Kurkov
The Master & Margarita by Mikhael Bulgakov
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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