The chief feelings Bennett owns up to are irritation, exasperation and queasiness at the filth accumulating in Miss Shepherd's van - uncharitable feelings, but ones he can afford given his charitableness, which most readers will admit, not even very guiltily, they wouldn't have shown Miss Shepherd themselves.Miss Shepherd makes Bennett feel a bit of a soft touch. He finds it hard not to be soft, even in his politics, which he describes as 'Soft Centre', and for a time in the 1980s, as his diary records, he sweetly put up posters for the local Alliance candidate (though Miss Shepherd countered these with her Conservative one). But he is not one to fudge, and around the time of the Falklands war there is the taste of something hard and bitter in his diaries, as Mrs Thatcher, the 'hyena crew of newsmen' and the jingoistic humbug leave him doubtful of the virtues of patriotism: 'Not English I feel now,' he writes in June 1982 'This is just where I happen to have been put down No country No party No Church. No voice.' Later, he expresses it differently, or has Guy Burgess express it differently in An Englishman Abroad: 'I can say I love London I can say I love England.

I can't say I love my country, because I don't know what that means.' It sounds a bit like E M Forster's famous remark on patriotism and betrayal, which is appropriate. A sceptical Forsterian liberalism is Bennett's true note, with jokes to boot.The jokes, delivered in a deadpan Yorkshire accent, are what audiences hear. He could be called an anecdotalist, since he tells good stories; he could be called a master of situation comedy, since he is comic about the situations people find themselves in - including the situation he found himself in when someone wrote for advice about a TV script: 'We sent it to Kenneth Williams and he was extremely enthusiastic about our script but he committed suicide soon after.' There is also, however, a strenuous, though never strained, intellectual wit; a love of double (at the very least) entendre; and a vein of fantasy - as when he imagines Kafka contemplating the contemporary world. Above all there is his ear (Bennett's Lug, it might be called, to go with Flaubert's Parrot, Foucault's Pendulum and his own Kafka's Dick), in the vicinity of which people hold remarkable conversations. At the home where his mother lives, for example, he hears one lady shout to another, over the noise of the hairdrier: 'I didn't want to be a Trappist nun. My father had Friar's Balsam in the medicine chest but that's as far as it went.'How compatible making jokes is with being taken seriously is a problem that interests and perhaps vexes Bennett.

It comes up with Kafka, a writer with a reputation for high seriousness, about whom he writes brilliantly and who he finds to be funnier and more English than people think - blackly comic enough to have said on his death-bed: 'I think I deserve the Nobel prize for sputum.' Bennett's is an opposite problem. In this book there are some grandly ringing observations on the human condition: try 'Every family has a secret, and the secret is that it's not like other families'. But it is the jokes people remember.He wouldn't want the jokes to be forgotten, but he sometimes feels like an imposter. When his play Getting On, which he hadn't intended to be funny, or only funny, won an Evening Standard award for the best comedy of 1971, he said at the ceremony that it was 'like entering a marrow for the show and being given the cucumber prize' That was carrying it off gracefully.

Elsewhere, the problems which directors, actors and critics have in knowing 'how to take' him give rise to tetchiness, though inevitably it breaks out as humour:Enjoy now in its second week at Richmond. See it tonight, after four days' absence, and find it has turned into A Girl in My Soup, with the actors hopping from laugh to laugh with no thought for what's in between. Several people, including Tom Sutcliffe in the Guardian, describe the play as 'Courageous'. Since the central character is in drag throughout, this presupposes that I spend my evenings idly running my fingers along a rack of strapless evening-gowns and adjusting my slingbacks. Now it can be told.It isn't told, because that would be telling. Readers for whom the word 'diaries' is now synonymous with sexual revelations will be disappointed by these, which come from someone who 'can scarcely remove his tie without first having a police cordon thrown round the building'. Though Bennett is not averse to discussing others' sexuality (Larkin's, Auden's), and though he is not wholly guarded about his own (he was tempted to go to Oxford after National Service, he says, because of a crush on one of his fellow officer cadets), he evidently feels that this business is no one else's business - perhaps not even the business of Alan Bennett the writer, who has other things to think about.He must have been strengthened in this conviction by the press's treatment of Russell Harty, a friend who taught him 'that to be silly is not to be foolish' and who is not forgotten here.