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“... books. Hence the cut-throat games of vocabulary-flashing and cultural reference pinned down by Harold Pinter and Joe Orton as Britain’s post-war national sport. Tynan, a bookish, unathletic boy, made this kind of competition his own. A compulsive player of word-games, he spattered his early writing with challenges to duels of literacy. A flip ...”

“... conveniently explicated schema (a trick much imitated later by the former Shakespearean actor Harold Pinter). Lewis’s reading of Hamlet nonetheless includes confident if literal-minded deductions about how much time has intervened between different scenes and events (Hamlet isn’t as well informed as he wants to sound about the current fortunes of ...”

“... braveLets no one off the grave.Death is no different whined at than withstood.The poem was read by Harold Pinter at a memorial meeting at Riverside Studios in the following March and I wrote it up in my diary:3 March 1986A commemorative programme for Larkin at Riverside Studios, arranged by Blake Morrison. Arrive late as there is heavy rain and the ...”

“... on stage plays, but was commissioning work for radio from avant-garde figures like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Giles Cooper. Equally ominous, News and Current Affairs in both Sound and Television built dynamic new empires, which attracted formidable young talents, took broadcasting boldly into politics, and used Features techniques when it suited ...”

“... waves of new energy, Littlewood’s proletarian populism burned only fitfully. And while both Harold Pinter and (arguably) Tom Stoppard started out as British absurdists, the influence of Beckett across the whole range has been less than in any other European country. John Heilpern says none of this, because he neither knows very much about ...”

“... on the very day itself – food shortages were worsening – and records an exchange ‘worthy of Harold Pinter’ which was overheard by a Mass Observer in a tobacconist’s shop. It is a virtuoso display of British Moaning, stirred by the protracted and confusing way in which Victory had been proclaimed. A middle-aped woman says: ‘They played us a ...”

“... hundred members by 1974, including Doris Lessing, Raymond Williams, Anthony Burgess, B.S. Johnson, Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, Kingsley Amis and the adamantine Murdoch. In 1979, the Public Lending Right was passed by Parliament (today, authors receive around 9.55p per loan, capped at £6,600 a year). Then Duffy dumped Brophy.Logic might have felt like a ...”

“... one-acter?Yes, possibly.Peter Dale told me you once produced a play at Oxford, a small piece by Harold Pinter.I had started another magazine at Oxford called Tomorrow. And for its fourth issue I’d written to Pinter. He had just become prominent then, but I’d learned about him earlier, when I was in ...”

“... pen portraits and has fascinating views on Modernist classics by Baudelaire and Ensor, Beckett and Pinter, but to those of us who have waited a lifetime this book satisfies little of the enormous expectation engendered by the long wait. It is surely significant that Freud, so important in Gay’s own life, while mentioned frequently, receives no real attention ...”

“... Guardian has a piece by Terry Eagleton saying that of all the eminent writers and playwrights only Pinter continues radical and untainted by the Establishment. I’m not sure if this means that in Eagleton’s view I don’t qualify because of my absence of eminence or because such protests as I take part in are too sporadic and low-profile to be ...”