Product Description

Alan Bennett is one of Britain's most successful and popular living writers. He is also one of the last survivors of a generation of rule-breakers and radicals that first found its voice with "Beyond the Fringe" in 1961. Since then, he has gone on to huge success with his plays ("Kafka's Dick", "An Englishman Abroad"), films ("A Private Function", "Prick Up Your Ears", "The Madness of King George"), monologues ("Talking Heads") and diaries ("Writing Home", "The Lady in the Van"). In "Backing into the Limelight", Alex Games examines the life of this intriguing, private man and sheds new light on his work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #402824 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-05
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Daily Express, September 15, 2001
"Games has done an excellent job... An affectionate, dryly funny and shrewd overview [with] a vastly entertaining postscript."

Daily Mail, September 14, 2001
"A rather valuable, certainly well-researched but, above all, readable companion to Bennett's life and times."

Sunday Telegraph, September 9, 2001
"... draws together the threads of Bennett's prolific output and, best of all, the characters he's created."

Customer Reviews

A compendium rather than a biography
Alexander Games by his own admission could have been given an easier subject for a biography such as 'Several long intimate chats with J.D. Salinger'. The playwright, writer and actor Alan Bennett however is shy rather than reclusive and those close to him respect this and his wishes to remain private.

Games describes in his postscript - 'The Futile Pursuit' his rather poor attempt to approach Bennett and the flood of rejection letters from Bennett's contemporaries. He ends by saying that there was no alternative now but to write the book, as if it were an essay and the deadline were looming.

What we are given therefore is a biography composed mainly of already accessible text (much of it taken from Bennett's own entertaining 'Writing Home') and lacking enough extra insight that would had hopefully come from research conducted by the biographer. There is a chapter on Bennett's days at Exeter College Oxford containing some good original material. What there isn't is the first hand reflection from others that makes a biography special.

Games knocked this book out in a year and for a man as important to both British arts and literature as Alan Bennett, this doesn't do him justice. The book is thick with praise but it is the praise from old newspaper stories... A better and more personal biography would have been possible if Games were willing to have spent longer getting closer to his subject rather than hitting the bookshelves. In all, an interesting but inessential read for Bennett fans.

marvellous, touching and insightful biography
This is one of the most right-rivetting reads that I have come across for some time. This young lad Games is a new talent in the biography world, but I have to say he has got that Mr Bennett down pat - as it were. The articulacy of the man is something to marvel. Realistic portrayals of moments in the writer's life that could only be conveyed with the sensitivity of another true literary talent - whose light is definitely languishing under a bushel - if you don't mind my saying so. Think about it no longer. This is a great bedside table companion, that will keep you chuckling and intrigued for a few nights or weeks to come (depending as it were on your speed reading prowess).

A tedious list of facts
Alan Bennett and his close friends refused to cooperate with this book, so instead the author spends whole chapters analysing, for example, the contents of Bennett's school magazine, and the suggestions book of the JCR at Exeter College Oxford. The term scraping the barrel comes to mind. The book is a useful chronology of Bennett's life, but for anything more, read Bennett's own far superior memoirs.