It is a curious literary form, the published diary. A surprising number of the classic diarists did write for eventual, usually posthumous, publication – Chips Channon under a 60-year embargo, A.C. Benson, Samuel Butler, in his wonderful notebooks, and surely the possibility was in the minds of Samuel Pepys and the Duc de Saint-Simon. More recently, great diaries have been published within the author’s lifetime. James Lees-Milne’s first instalment came out 30 years after the period it described. Alan Clark’s initial offering, covering 1983-92, appeared in 1993. Tony Benn’s hilariously tedious volumes emerged on a rolling programme which slowly caught up with the events they described.

They promise intimacy but too often deliver considered reflection, with one eye on what the readership will think. This is especially true of the rash of hopeless political diaries which the genius of Clark inspired into hard covers. The truly honest private diary, meant only for intimate reflection, is a rarity. Some, such as Philip Larkin’s or the final volume of Sylvia Plath’s, were destroyed by the executors.

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Alan Bennett’s diaries are on the public side of the genre. This is the fourth volume, but they seem to have been more or less available from the start, often appearing in annual instalments in the London Review of Books. Enough Said takes Bennett past his 90th birthday, and its overriding theme is loss. Pleasures and capacities are withdrawn – first cycling, then hearing; memory starts to fail; and finally the right word, or any word at all, disappears from the grasp. Treasured destinations, such as New York, become inconceivable. Friends of decades start to exit, sometimes, like Jonathan Miller, preceded by their mental abilities; sometimes a longtime friend who occupies a place among the great, like Maggie Smith, must be mourned amid a torrent of public sentiment. The world narrows and the diarist becomes more reflective.

More than once Bennett apologises to the reader for saying things he’s said many........

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