The Uncommon Reader

by Alan Bennett

Oddity though he was, Norman was himself and seemed incapable of being anything else. That was very rare.

and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.’

The reading, though, made him uneasy. ‘I feel, ma’am, that while not exactly elitist it sends the wrong message. It tends to exclude.’ ‘Exclude? Surely most people can read?’ ‘They can read, ma’am, but I’m not sure that they do.’ ‘Then, Sir Kevin, I am setting them a good example.’ She smiled sweetly,

It transpired that with no prior notification to her attendants the Queen had abandoned her long-standing lines of inquiry – length of service, distance travelled, place of origin – and had embarked on a new conversational gambit, namely, ‘What are you reading at the moment?’ To this very few of Her Majesty’s loyal subjects had a ready answer (though one did try: ‘The Bible?’).

At her age, people thought, why bother? To her, though, nothing could have been more serious, and 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.

Previously she wouldn’t have cared what the maid thought or that she might have hurt her feelings, only now she did and coming back to the chair she wondered why.

‘I adored your book’ would have said it all, but fifty years of composure and self-possession plus half a century of understatement stood in the

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met with in the pages of their novels, and as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.

have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.’

‘I would have thought,’ said the prime minister, ‘that Your Majesty was above literature.’ ‘Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.