House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries

Alan Bennett

Lord Whimsy – London is a great town for readers and bookstores. Daunt. Waterstones. London Review Book Shop, where I picked up this slim volume by the great Alan Bennett along with books by Edouard Louis and Diane Williams. Bennett has the power to enchant with whimsy and insight – one example: his observation after watching a televised wreath-placing ceremony during the pandemic that just one of Queen Elizabeth’s many triumphs as a nonagenarian is the ability to walk backward. Bennett notes here, too, that his task as a playwright is to move the audience to feel, “Here is somebody who knows what it is like to be me.”