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'On the 100th anniversary of his birth a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as poet of Cumbria. Auden couldn't have inhabited his ideal landscape, however nurturing he found the idea of it. Everything about him was urban. He wanted opera, libraries, restaurants, rent boys - all the appurtenances of civilisation. You don't find them in Penrith.'
From Alan Bennett's 2007 diary, published in the London Review of Books, 3 January 2008.

'Alan Bennett may be right about the dearth of rent boys in Penrith, but he's wrong about libraries: there's a good one right by the church.'
Reader's letter printed in the London Review of Books, 24 January 2008