Untold Stories, by Alan Bennett

The subject comes up again when he is discussing the profound shyness of his parents - a reticence the author himself inherited from them. At one point he assures his father that social ease was something that could and should be faked. "'Well, you can do that,' Dad would say, 'you've been educated,' adding how often he felt he had nothing to contribute. 'I'm boring, I think. I can't understand why anybody likes us. I wonder sometimes whether they do, really.'"

Even when discussing boredom, Bennett is never boring. While occasionally I found it sadly uplifting (or upliftingly sad), throughout this autobiography runs a belief in good sense, tolerance and clemency, along with a real depth of sentiment, clothed in the language of brilliant and witty perspicuity which gives to these 658 pages an enduring claim to respect.

This memoir contains poignant accounts of family life which flew on to paper only after Bennett was operated on for cancer of the colon and, given less than a 50-50 chance of survival, hastened to ensure that the accounts should be "pre-posthumous". By far the most moving account is that on the fate of his "Mam", Lilian, who succumbed to severe depression, derangement and, finally, death in the years following her and her husband's move from Leeds to a small village. She had a dread of "going public" and of ostentation of any kind, which she called "common". She had obsessions about colours, buckets, tattoos, two-tone cardigans, tangerine curtains and camel-hair coats - all disparaged for being common. She was otherwise an admirable wife and mother, but her "fastidious deprecations", as Bennett puts it, carried her into a dark night of the soul.

Indeed, her descents call to mind the depressions of John Yepes (aka St John of the Cross), mainly brought about by the "terrible pain of scrupulosity" which I suspect was her burden too. "Mam" dies in a kind of hospice in 1995, 21 years after her husband Walter's fatal heart attack, possibly induced, Bennett surmises, by daily 50-mile round trips to visit her, not willing to miss a split-second of precious visiting time.

One is struck by the parents' amazing innocence as much as by their intense shyness. "Drink would have helped but both my parents were teetotallers, though more from taste than conviction... The nearest [they] came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey." Then one day: "Mam rang up in some excitement. 'Your Dad and me have found an alcoholic drink that we really like. It's called bitter lemon.'" Walter Bennett seemed to believe implicitly in quack cures. On his death, Alan finds in his father's wallet a newspaper cutting announcing "Cure Bronchitis in a Week! Deep Breathing the Only Answer."

Bennett's life with his parents is so simply, clearly described that readers will inhale the very odours of home: wintergreen, duster coats, raw meat from Dad's butcher's shop, their old-fashioned kitchen range which Mam preferred to "the tiled fireplaces everybody round about thought were the height of sophistication".

The book treats lightly the way in which his own shyness - and to some extent his spectacles - impeded Bennett's sexual experience, and I laughed aloud when he recalls saying, at a charity concert, "that to enquire (as Ian McKellen had done) if I was a homosexual was like asking someone who had just crawled across the Sahara Desert whether they preferred Malvern or Perrier water".

There is so much engaging material here, from the experience of being savagely mugged when travelling in Italy with his partner Rupert Thomas; the cancer operation and its aftermath (Alec Guinness evinced annoyance when Bennett's hair failed to fall out following chemotherapy); his insights into renowned entertainers such as the late Dudley Moore; to the behaviour of bin men in Camden where he lives.Bennett writes: "I have never found it easy to belong." After Untold Stories, I have no hesitation in saying he belongs to all of us. And we're all grateful.