Hugh Massingberd

Bounty Bar Bates

Otherwise Engaged: The Life of Alan Bates

By

Hutchinson 308pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

Serialisation, which tends to be equally crass and sensational whether in broadsheet or tabloid form, often seems something of a mixed blessing. Certainly the treatment given to this book – which appeared to aim at provoking the crude reaction, ‘Blimey! Batesy was a bender’, and to be stuffed with ‘exploded quotes’ along the lines of (I paraphrase) ‘The trouble with Alan, darling, is that he didn’t know whether he was Arthur or Martha!’ – made me mutter, ‘Surely Sir Alan, one of our most deservedly popular performers, deserved better than this?’

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    Follow Us