Volume 42, Number 3 · February 16, 1995
The Great Art of Embarrassment
By Ian Buruma
Writing Home
by Alan Bennett
Faber and Faber (to be published by Random House this autumn), 417 pp., $17.50
The Madness of King George III
a film directed by Nicholas Hytner. screenplay by Alan Bennett, based on his play The Madness of George III
The Madness of George III
by Alan Bennett
Faber and Faber, 94 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Sydney and Linda are characters in a play by Alan Bennett, entitled Kafka's Dick.[1] Sydney, like Kafka, is an insurance man. He is interested in books, or, more precisely, in the people who write them. He likes biographies: 'I'd rather read about writers than read what they write.' Linda, his wife, does not share her husband's literary interests. But she has picked up one or two tidbits; she knows that Auden wore no underpants, and that 'Mr. Right for E.M. Forster was an Egyptian tramdriver.' Some day, she says, she'll read and 'learn the bits in between.' Sydney, exasperated by his wife's obtuseness, explains why she has missed the point: 'This is England. In England facts like that pass for culture. Gossip is the acceptable face of intellect.'
Review, 5208 words
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