Keeping On Keeping On
by Alan Ben nett (Faber/Profile, £25)
©RUPERT THOMAS
It’s a mark of Alan Bennett’s centrality to the literaiy scene that he manages to tum up in the consciousness of the averagely bookish person at the rate of two or three times a week. And so, in the five days it took me to read this lavish miscellany I found myself inundated, surrounded and in the end positively menaced by references to him in other books and art-forms. There he was in a battered anthology from the early days of the London Review of Books appraising a volume of reminiscences by his old hero (and star of his first big dramatic hit Forty Years On) John Gielgud. There he was again in the paperback of the second tranche of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, swelling the throng of her substantial band of book-world detractors. And there he was fbr a third time in the DVD of Channel 4’s late-1590s attempt at the novelist Anthony Powell’s A Dance to theMusic ofTime, playing the part of Sillery, the conniving Oxford don.