Alan Bennett hands over his entire archive to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University – Bennett seeing the gift as a small recompense for what he was given.

“I was educated free right from the start. I was educated free in Leeds where I went to a state school, and then I got a scholarship to Exeter College Oxford, and so at no point did my parents or me have to pay anything for my education.

“One didn’t have much money, but one never really gave money a thought because you had just about enough to be going on with. Now that’s a situation that students today can only dream of, really.

“In that sense giving the manuscripts to Bodley – it sounds rather pious – is a kind of small recompense for what I was given. And not merely given by Oxford, I also feel I was given it by the state, and the state isn’t something that people would normally thank or think well of and hence the phrase ‘the nanny state’.

“I was nannied in the sense that everything was paid for, the Leeds education committee gave me a scholarship and then I had another scholarship later on: now if that’s being nannied, I’m all for it.” Source: The Guardian.