‘I’ve got great faith in the corner of the eye.’ Alan Bennett is talking about the picture by the 18th-century Welsh artist Thomas Jones of some towels drying on a balcony in Naples. It is an utterly ordinary, unremarkable scene, a piece of background, but in its freshness, its irresistible thereness it jumps off the wall. Jones only painted a handful of these little sketches, devoting the rest of his life to muddy historical paintings and pleasant but standard-issue landscapes. Alan Bennett by contrast has devoted his life to freezing the corner-of-the-eye moment, so that it seems not only touching and funny but somehow grand, far grander in fact than the bombastic rodomontades of high literature which by comparison come out looking like so much ‘splother’, to use the lovely word much employed by Walter and Lilian Bennett, Alan’s Mam and Dad, to dismiss anything smacking of ostentation, pretension and fuss.

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