THEATRE
It’s time for an Arnold Bennett revival
The Potteries writer who went from Staffordshire to the Savoy has been unfairly forgotten, says Clive Davis
Arnold Bennett: “the victim of preconceptions,” writes Clive Davis
ALAMY
The Times
Is Arnold Bennett back in fashion? Not quite. It’s unlikely his reputation will ever come close to reaching the level he enjoyed at the time of his death in 1931. If the Potteries-born writer still has his admirers today, they’re vastly outnumbered by those of his Bloomsbury nemesis, Virginia Woolf, the writer who did so much to turn the tastemakers against him. Hostile to his plain speaking and his brand of realism, she dismissed him as “an insignificant little man”. Today, mention of Bennett raises thoughts of the omelette bearing his name that is still on the menu at one of his favourite haunts, the Savoy Grill. (He and Winston Churchill, another regular, would hail each other from their tables.) The millions of TV viewers
