Extended excerpt [Fictional dialogue, ‘The Queen’ to an audience gathered for her 80th birthday]:

“And of course,” said the Queen, “it goes on, not a week passing without something of interest, a scandal, a cover-up or even a war. And since this is one’s birthday you must not even think of looking peeved” – the minister was studying the ceiling and the home secretary the carpet – “for one has a long perspective and it was ever thus. At eighty things do not occur; the recur.” (p.83)

Source link: The Uncommon Reader (2007) Accessed online via Scribd [subscription service] International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-374-28096-7: https://www.scribd.com/read/182566102/The-Uncommon-Reader-A-Novella

Extended excerpt: [Memoir] “I did not see cancer as a way of dramatizing my life, the lurid light of approaching death endowing even the most trivial events with a long shadow. Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.” (p. 823)

Source link: Untold Stories (2005 – March 2011 ebook edition) Accessed online via Scribd [subscription service] – International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-312-42662-3: https://www.scribd.com/read/182525012/Untold-Stories#

Extended excerpt [Bennett, reflecting on the book he eventually used as a base for his play adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, a play the article preface describes as “the biggest hit in the National Theatre’s history.]:

“It was only in the Sixties, when I was rather haphazardly reading round the Edwardians with some vague idea of writing a history play (which eventually turned into Forty Years On), that I read Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age and Dream Days. I left The Wind in the Willows until last because I thought I had read it already – this being virtually the definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.” (p.10)

Source: The Independent on Sunday (27 January 1991) The Independent Digital Archive, 1986-2012, via Gale News Group, Gale Document Number FQ4200281768 [Accessed July 2016 – Washington University Library]

Extended excerpt [Play – Fiction, based on a true story – character ‘Guy Burgess’ to ‘Coral Browne’]:

Burgess (gently) “The system. Only, being English, you wouldn’t be interested in that. (Pause) My trouble is, I lack what the English call character. By which they mean the power to refrain. Appetite. The English never like that, do they? Unconcealed appetite. For success. Women. Money. Justice. Appetite makes them uncomfortable. What do people say about me in England?”

Coral “They don’t say much any more.” (p.290)

Source note: An Englishman Abroad was originally produced as a BBC television drama in 1983.

Source: Library – Alan Bennett: Plays (1998) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-571-19442-7