Quotes from work
Forty Years On

Forty Years On

Forty Years On is a 1968 play by Alan Bennett. It was his first West End play.


Alan Bennett photo
Alan Bennett photo
Alan Bennett photo
Alan Bennett photo
Alan Bennett photo
Alan Bennett photo

“Franklin: Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.”

Act 2.
Bennett is often credited with having coined the pun "snobbery with violence", though he himself pointed out in Writing Home (1994), p. 199, that the phrase had been used by Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk in 1932 as the title of a pamphlet.
Forty Years On (1972)

Alan Bennett photo

“Headmaster: They were all socialists. Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?”

Act 2, p. 75.
Of the Bloomsbury group.
Forty Years On (1972)

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