The Uncommon Reader
By Alan Bennett
Profile £10.99, 124 pages
FT bookshop price: £8.79

This isn’t the first time Alan Bennett has written about the Queen. In his play A Question of Attribution, Bennett introduced us to a wickedly joshing monarch (indelibly incarnated by Prunella Scales), a woman capable of straightfacedly asking Sir Anthony Blunt whether, had she acceded to Francis Bacon’s request that he paint her portrait, she would have been called “the screaming Queen”.