My good and excellent friend Patrick Gale got Richard & Judy-ed yesterday.  Despite a general reputation of writers being miserable creatures given to seething resentment at the success of others (viz, the later writings of V S Naipaul, who waits until you're dead then tells the world he never liked you), I couldn't be happier for him.  It's a terrific book (Notes From An Exhibition) and he's a genuinely nice and generous man.  Very mentor-like in a number of ways to me as a newbie in the publishing world.  Buy it; you'd be supporting an excellent writer and a terrific human being.

The more I see Harold Pinter, the less I'm sure about the "human being" part of the equation for him.  His plays are always tart, sharp, beguilingly strange and interesting, but would you want your daughter to date him?  I saw The Homecoming at the Almeida (God, I love the Almeida, always interesting stuff there).  It was, as my friend Gary put it, "extraordinarily weird", but fascinating in the questions of power and gender.  First time a black actress has played Ruth, too, apparently, making it even more interesting.

But she, as is not uncommon in the Pinters I've seen, gets almost no funny lines, whereas the men get loads.  He's married to Antonia Fraser, who's hardly a slouch, so I'm probably way off the beam here, but as a young man, anyway, you get to wondering whether Pinter actually knew the women he dated.  Good play, though.  Wonder what women think of it?