There was a legendary Oxford don called Bruce McFarlane, who supervised Alan Bennett’s thesis on Richard II’s retinue from 1388 to 1389.
McFarlane used to say Bennett was the best pupil he ever had – ‘before he went off and joined the circus’. This was the donnish way of describing Bennett, then engaged in his medieval research, who was lured into joining Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller in Beyond the Fringe.
Those who watched the TV adaptation of Anthony Powell’s will have been struck by how brilliantly Bennett
