The Uncommon Reader

by Alan Bennett

To Norman she was his employer, but her age made her as much patient as Queen and in both capacities to be humoured,

if reading was to be done it were better done in a place not set aside for it.

Read? Of course he read. Everybody read. He opened the glove compartment and took out his copy of the Sun.

Surely most people can read?’ ‘They can read, ma’am, but I’m not sure that they do.’

reading purely for pleasure, not enlightenment, though part of the pleasure was the enlightenment,

‘We’re going to Wales in a few weeks’ time.’ ‘Bad luck, ma’am.’

Casual racism?

it would help if we were able to put out a press release saying that, apart from English literature, Your Majesty was also reading ethnic classics.’ ‘Which ethnic classics did you have in mind, Sir Kevin? The Kama Sutra?’

‘To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable.

‘One reads for pleasure,’ said the Queen. ‘It is not a public duty.’

Nor initially did she discuss her reading with anyone, least of all in public, knowing that such a late-flowering enthusiasm, however worthwhile, might expose her to ridicule. It would be the same, she thought, if she had developed a passion for God, or dahlias.

she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing, that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

‘Opsimath: one who learns only late in life.’

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met with in the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

The public must not be allowed to think the world could not be managed. That way lay chaos. Or defeat at the polls, which was the same thing.

‘One recipe for happiness is to have no sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.’

he remarked that being a writer didn’t excuse one from being a human being. Whereas (one didn’t say this) being Queen does.

she felt not unlike an air hostess going through the safety procedures,

‘My experience of prime ministers, Prime Minister, is that, with Mr Macmillan the exception, they prefer to have their reading done for them.’

‘You don’t put your life into your books. You find it there.’

A reader was next door to being a spectator whereas when she was writing she was doing, and doing was her duty.

‘Books are wonderful, aren’t they?’ she said to the vice-chancellor, who concurred. ‘At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak,’ she said, ‘they tenderise one.’

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

‘To inquire into the evidence for something on which you have already decided is the unacknowledged premise of every public inquiry, surely?’

‘One has given one’s white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore; to be Queen, I have often thought the one essential item of equipment a pair of thigh-length boots.

Sometimes one has felt like a scented candle, sent in to perfume a regime, or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deodorant.