FREQUENT VISITOR.(Alan Bennett)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 15-MAY-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Alan Bennett, the English diarist, playwright, and sometime monologuist, came to town a few weeks ago for the New York premiere of his play "The History Boys." He was oddly calm for a man about to open on Broadway. "When I first came here, with Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, with 'Beyond the Fringe,' in 1962, we didn't really like it," he said one recent morning, over a pretzel croissant at City Bakery, on Eighteenth Street. "The food was awful. We wouldn't have got anything like this." He gestured at the roomful of cappuccino and brioches. "We were sorry that we were going to have to stay here for a year and a half, which you had to do for tax reasons in those days. Shows how arrogant we were. We all signed leases on apartments and resigned ourselves to staying here for all...

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