Alan Bennett: Libraries Gave Us Power (Again).

'I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there.
'A scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays I have written has a character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled.
'He – and occasionally she – is overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has been written and the ground to be covered.
'All these books. I’ll never catch up,” wails young Joe Orton in the film script of Prick Up Your Ears.
'Orton himself notoriously defaced library books before starting to write books.
'This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had to do with feeling shut out.
'A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party with everybody standing with their back to me; I could not find a way in...'

The Mirror.
The third outing - at least - for (a heavily excised version of) Alan's LRB essay on libraries.
Fine by me.
Mr Bennett has been supporting the campaign Save Kensal Rise Library.