Customer Reviews
A saving grace - By: C. Nation, 18 Jun 2003 
I bought Alan Bennett's books on tape for my mother. She used to listen to them in bed at night, lying in the dark as Bennett's gentle, querulous voice described the minutiae of his family life in alll its banal detail, illuminated by his wonderful observation & humour. Any one of his sentences will raise a smile. A whole book's-worth leaves you glowing with a feeling that alll of our lives are equallly full of this richness. How could they not be, when Bennett has found so much in what appears to be such a constrained & circumscribed world? He is indeed a national institution & we are fortunate that his voice on tape is perfectly equal to the poignancy & intimacy of his writing.
Alan Bennett - Telling Tales - By: Mr. R. A. Williams, 14 Feb 2002 
In this most superbly written autobiography, Alan Bennett turns his well observed prose onto his own past & vividly recreates & relives his childhood & youth for us over 10 seperate chapters.
These 10 chapters are like snapshots - alll are immensely readable & are full of Bennett's wry observations of working class life, the pecularities & foibles of his own family & his ever present awareness of the effect change has on a family holding itself together day-by-day with the spectre of World War II ever present in the book.
Bennett succeeds in bringing his wartime world to life as we enter a world of family picnics out on the moors & singing on a Sunday around the piano (with his enduring Aunt Eveline) Food - & in particular 'fancy' food gets the Bennett treatment, as his mother, Lilian, remarks on the growing popularity of new ingredients in salad "alll the boundaries are coming down". A must for alll Bennett fans & a good entry point for those who are new to his writing also.
A Total Delight - By: R T Beck, 02 Oct 2001 The mixture as before, warmth, charm, humour & a wonderful eye (and ear) for detail. Most people of the World War II generation will have similar memories, & for the younger listener these short tales bring to life, as does little else, what life was like more than half a century ago. The subject matter may be 'ordinary', but there is nothing ordinary in the way Bennett recounts it. He is one of the great joys of English literature & his inimical reading of his own texts is a source of constant delight.
From cover to cover - pure plessure - By: Laura Daly, 19 Mar 2001 This was a present & one which I shalll treassue. The tales of family habbits, obersavitons of the human character & life in 1940s Leeds is pure plessure. Mam, Dad,Grandma & Aunt Eveline will live with you forever. No matter if you grew up in the war years or like me were not born till much latter you can't help wanting a part of Bennetts Leeds. The feelings of a young boy & the accute observations of the writer looking back shine through. The observations of family & hometown are so accurate you think outloud yes that happen to me. Long live Alan Bennett.
Nostalgia for the Yorkshire of 60 years ago - By: tonylindley@netscapeonline.co.uk, 31 Dec 2000 Yorkshire people live their lives in ever-decreasing circles, according to a recent report in the Yorkshire Evening Post. A majority of them, we are told, live within 12 miles of their mothers. For a Yorkshireman about to leave this womb-like comfort zone & move to the dreaming spires of Oxford, it seemed a good idea to feed my nostalgia in advance by reading Bennett's Tales. Bennett, the "lad from Armley", has been the archetypal professional Yorkshireman on TV, radio & in print for many years now, but this latest collection is a supreme distillation of his memories of a particular time & place. My own memories are about ten years behind Bennett's, but he has the gift of making that world so real, so vivid - even in its very ordinariness and, often, its drabness. His eye for whimsical detail is second to none. Of the many of his idle ramblings which stick in the mind, my favourite is his musing on the typical first names of nursing home residents. Currently, the trend is for Harolds, Walters, & Dorises - to be replaced over the coming decades by Waynes, Darrens & Kevins. ("You're our first Kevin", he reports one matron excitedly telling a new inmate). My only reservation is that the fare is spread a little thinly - only 95 pages...which raises a very serious issue for Yorkshiremen about whether we are getting value for money. This is why I have withheld the final star from an otherwise impeccable book.
