In 1974, the homeless Miss Shepherd moved her broken down van into Alan Bennett's garden. Deeply eccentric and stubborn to her bones, Miss Shepherd was not an easy tenant. And Bennett, despite inviting her in the first place, was a reluctant landlord. And yet she lived there for fifteen years. This account of those years was first published in 1989 in the London Review of Books. The play premiered in 1999, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Dame Maggie Smith, who reprise their roles in this new film adaptation. Shot on location at Bennett's house, Alex Jennings plays the author, alongside household names including Frances de la Tour, Jim Broadbent and Dominic Cooper.

A concise collection of Alan Bennett's latest diaries - and more. Following the phenomenally successful Writing Home and Untold Stories, Keeping On Keeping On contains Bennett's diaries 2005 to 2015, reflecting on a decade that saw four premieres at the National Theatre, a West End double-bill transfer, and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. There's a provocative sermon against private education, a passionate defence of the public library, a radio play and a screenplay, introductions and eulogies. An unforgettable record of life according to the inimitable Alan Bennett.

Here are Alan Bennett's four hugely admired, triumphantly reviewed and bestselling stories, brought together in one book for the first time. Like everything Bennett does, these stories are playful, witty and painfully observant of ordinary people's foibles. They all have brilliant twists, are immensely entertaining and highly moral. And all are modern classics. The Laying on of Hands The painfully observant account of a memorial service for a masseur to the famous. The Clothes They Stood Up In The comic tale of an elderly couple's trials after their flat is stripped completely bare. Father! Father! Burning Bright The savage satire on the family of a dying man who rules over them from his hospital bed. The Lady in the Van The true story of the eccentric old woman who is invited to live in a homeowner's front garden. She stays there, in her van, for fifteen years. The home is Alan Bennett's. It became a West End hit and a major film, starring Maggie Smith.

A stunning first graphic novel by a Cape/Comica/Observer graphic short story competition winner - a tale of a skirmish in the ice-cream wars that is worthy of Alan Bennett In the small seaside town of Dobbiston, Howard sells ice creams from his van, just like his father before him. But when he notices a downturn in trade, he soon realises its cause: Tony Augustus, Howard's half-brother, whose ice-cream empire is expanding all over the North-West... Flake, Matthew Dooley's debut graphic novel, tells of how this epic battle turns out, and how Howard - helped by the Dobbiston Mountain Rescue team - overcomes every obstacle and triumphs in the end.

The scene is set for a huge funeral in St Patrick's Cathedral in New York. The rich and the famous from all over America and beyond have arrived to honour a former First Lady after her sudden, unexpected death. Then follows an attack that was three years in the planning. Hostages are taken the ex-President among them ransoms demanded, a couple of hostages shot to show the kidnappers mean business. It's all brilliantly and chillingly co-ordinated, and Michael Bennett, the detective in charge of the case, knows it will be his biggest ever challenge.

The mayor of New York has a daughter who's missing. Detective Michael Bennett has a son who's in prison. Can one father help the other? Bennett and the mayor have always had a tense relationship, but now the mayor sees in Bennett an exceptional investigator who might be willing to take on a case that needs to be kept under the radar. The two men strike the deal. Sources lead Bennett to a homicide in the Bronx. The victim has ties to a sophisticated hacking operation - and also to the mayor's missing daughter. But this murder is part of a serial killing spree, one with national security implications. And suddenly Bennett is at the centre of a dangerous triangle anchored by NYPD, FBI and an international crime organization. Michael Bennett has always been an honourable man, but sometimes honour has to take a back seat. Survival comes first.

Michael Bennett, be grateful you're alive. Someone attacked the Thanksgiving Day Parade directly in front of Michael Bennett and his family. The television news called it 'holiday terror' - Michael Bennett calls it personal. The hunt is on...

You can take Michael Bennett out of New York City, but you can't take the cop out of Michael Bennett. Detective Michael Bennett is ready for a vacation after a series of crises push him, and his family, to the brink. He settles on an idyllic small town in the beautiful Maine woods. But just when Bennett thinks he can relax, he gets pulled into a case that has shocked the tight-knit community. Kids are disappearing with no explanation - until several bodies turn up in the woods. Far from the city streets he knows so well, Bennett is fighting to protect a town, the law, and the family that he loves above all else.

Alan Brown is a normal teenager who lives in London. Like everyone his age, Alan has problems. Problems with his family, friends, school, and the new girl in his class. Alan writes about his thoughts and feelings in his diary. Maybe you’ll laugh, maybe you’ll cry, but as you read the diary you will get to know the real Alan, the world he’s living in, and what he does about his problems.

In Piemburgem, the deceptively peaceful-looking capital of Zululand, Kommandant van Heerden, Konstabel Els and Luitenant Verkramp continue to terrorise true Englishman and even truer Zulus in their relentless search for a perfect South Africa. Kommandant van Heerden, that great Anglophile, gropes his way towards attaining true 'Englishness' in the company of the eccentric Dornford Yates Club. But Luitenant Verkramp, whose hatred of all things English is surpassed only by his fear of sex, sets in motion an experiment in mass chastity (with the help of a lady psychiatrist), which has remarkable and quite unforeseen results.

As Michael Bennett's wedding day approaches, a killer has a vow of his own to fulfil in the thirteenth thriller featuring the NYPD's finest detective Weeks before NYPD Detective Michael Bennett is to marry his long-time love, Mary Catherine, an assassin announces their presence in the city with a string of murders. All of the victims are young women, and each has been killed in a manner as precise as it was gruesome. Tasked with working alongside the FBI, Bennett uncovers multiple cold-case homicides across the country that fit the same distinctive pattern. He promises Mary Catherine that the case won't affect their upcoming wedding, but, as he struggles to connect the killings, Bennett may be walking into a deadly trap.

In July 1969, while the Rolling Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park, Alan Johnson and his young family left West London to start a new life. The Britwell Estate in Slough, apparently notorious among the locals, in fact came as a blessed relief after the tensions of Notting Hill, and the local community welcomed them with open arms. Alan had become a postman the previous year, and in order to support his growing family took on every bit of overtime he could, often working twelve-hour shifts six days a week. It was hard work, but not without its compensations – the crafty fag snatched in a country lane, the farmer’s wife offering a hearty breakfast and even the mysterious lady on Glebe Road who appeared daily, topless, at her window as the postman passed by… Please, Mister Postman paints a vivid picture of England in the 1970s, where no celebration was complete without a Party Seven of Watney’s Red Barrel, smoking was the norm rather than the exception, and Sunday lunchtime was about beer, bingo and cribbage. But as Alan’s life appears to be settling down and his career in the Union of Postal Workers begins to take off, his close-knit family is struck once again by tragedy… Moving, hilarious and unforgettable, Please, Mister Postman is another astonishing book from the award-winning author of This Boy.

Unexpected tales from the master of short fiction The Shielding of Mrs Forbes Graham Forbes is a disappointment to his mother, who thinks that if he must have a wife, he should have done better. Though her own husband isn't all that satisfactory either. Still, this is Alan Bennett, so what is happening in the bedroom (and in lots of other places too) is altogether more startling, perhaps shocking, and ultimately more true to people's predilections. The Greening of Mrs Donaldson Mrs Donaldson is a conventional middle-class woman beached on the shores of widowhood after a marriage that had been much like many others: happy to begin with, then satisfactory and finally dull. But when she decides to take in two lodgers, her mundane life becomes much more stimulating...

Making van Gogh focuses on the oeuvre of Vincent van Gogh in the context of its reception. The publication examines the particular role which German gallerists, collectors, critics and museums played in the story of his success. At the same time it sheds light on the importance of van Gogh as a role model for the avant-garde generation of artists. "Van Gogh is dead, but the van Gogh-chaps are alive! And how alive they are! It is van Goghing everywhere", was how Ferdinand Avenarius described it in 1910 in the magazine Der Kunstwart. Vincent van Gogh's paintings exerted a particular fascination on young artists in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Barely fifteen years after his death the Dutch artist was seen as one of the most important forerunners of modern painting. A selection of key works from all van Gogh's creative phases are juxtaposed with works by Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Munter, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and others.

This stunning compilation of the work of Jan van Eyck, the master Flemish painter, is being published to coincide with a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition in Ghent. Flemish painter Jan van Eyck (1390-1441) towered above his contemporaries. With his unprecedented technique, scientific knowledge, and unparalleled powers of observation, Van Eyck lifted oil painting to previously unknown heights and helped determine the course of Western art. In 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent will host the largest ever exhibition of Van Eyck's work. Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution includes artwork by Van Eyck, several pieces from his studio, and international masterpieces from the late Middle Ages while making the world of Van Eyck more tangible than ever. This tie-in exhibition catalog unravels some of the myths that surround Van Eyck and his techniques, while showing his complete oeuvre and influence in a new perspective. Including essays by leading experts from around the world, Van Eyck will prove to be an indispensable resource for Van Eyck fans and scholars alike. 350 color illustrations.

Alan Noland discovers his father's memoirs and learns the truth about the violent man he despised. In this unsparing family history, Alan distils his father's life in the Dutch East Indies into one furious utterance. He reads about his work as an interpreter during the war with Japan, his life as an assassin, and his decision to murder Indonesians in the service of the Dutch without any conscience. How he fled to the Netherlands to escape being executed as a traitor and met Alan's mother soon after. As he reads his father's story Alan begins to understand how war transformed his father into the monster he knew. Birney exposes a crucial chapter in Dutch and European history that was deliberately concealed behind the ideological facade of postwar optimism. Readers of this superb novel will find that it reverberates long afterwards in their memory.