Keeping On Keeping On

Book excerpt: One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year: “Humorous, surprising, disarmingly human” essays and comic pieces from one of England’s national treasures (The Washington Post Book World). A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of the Year A Lambda Literary Award finalist Bringing together the hilarious, revealing, and lucidly intelligent writing of one of England’s best-known literary figures, Keeping On Keeping On contains Tony Award–winning playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and actor Alan Bennett’s diaries from 2005 to 2015—with everything from his much celebrated essays to his irreverent comic pieces and reviews—reflecting on a decade that saw four major theater premieres and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. This entertaining chronicle of a life in letters comes from a “singular voice [with] a highly tuned ironic wit—his special brand of gentleness laced with arsenic” (The New York Times Book Review). “Part of the pleasure of his diaries is the sense that [Bennett] tells them things he would never say out loud.” —The New York Review of Books “Consistently funny and touching.” —The Telegraph