Shameful Alan Bennett

ho voiced the real feelings of the British intelligentsia with the opinion that on the whole many people thought the Americans had it coming, and if you identified the British intelligentsia with LRB reviewers, then she was spot on. But generally it just isn’t as good as it used to be: you can see the direction it’s been going in from the adverts in the back pages for courses at various psychoanalytic/Lacanian institutions. Plus their favourite writer seems to be the unreadable Adam Phillips.

Well, no, in fact their favourite writer is Alan Bennett. Every January the LRB publishes Bennett’s diary for the previous year. Unfortunately it’s not on line, but you can see the title of this year’s piece in the contents page. “A Shameful Year”. No surprise about what according to Bennett is so shameful, but it strikes me as very odd. I can think of many shameful things: Munich and Chamberlain was shameful. The behaviour of the Major government, refusing to allow arms to the Bosnians while Milosevic carried out his ethnic cleansing and the UN stood by, that was shameful. The total inaction of the UN while Hutus slew Tutsis in Rwanda, until they set up camps over the border in Zaire (as it then was) which were taken over by those same Hutus: that was shameful. But getting rid of one of the most despicable tyrants in modern history and freeing the Iraqis from their decades-long nightmare…shameful?? Clearly we live on different planets.