Alan Bennett: Lisa Says

Certain authors have fan clubs: Austen, Trollope, Lewis Carroll and, more recently, Anthony Powell. Their work gets fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them. Poets don't have fans in quite this way, though in the days of "the love that dare not speak its name" Housman was a telltale volume to have on the bookshelf, along with Forrest Reid, say, or Denton Welch. And Betjeman began as a somewhat eccentric taste, his admirers a bit of a club, before the poetry made a space for itself and was taken up by the nation...

Alan Bennett writes on his favourite poets for the Guardian.

Fagburn was thrilled to see at Mr Bennett's exhibition at The Bodleian Library, that Alan also writes whilst looking onto a small Lisa Simpson toy. 

We could be sisters!