Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter - Hardcover

The Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter and the acclaimed biographer Antonia Fraser lived together for 33 years until his death in 2008. Based on the diaries she kept from 1968, Fraser's memoir of their life together is a touching and insightful account of the joys, sorrows and difficulties they shared. In recounting their daily activities, it sheds fascinating light on Pinter's writing, the worlds of theatre, film and television, and his unflagging and often controversial political activism. American cut pages. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Antonia Fraser's poignant memoir Must You Go? begins in 1975 when, aged 42, she meets the playwright with 'bright black eyes' at a dinner party, sparking a 33-year love affair (HARPER'S BAZAAR)

Antonia Fraser writes a moving portrait of her relationship with late husband Harold Pinter (VOGUE)

But the book is in the end not so much a literary memoir as the simplest of love stories. As such, it's captivating (David Sexton EVENING STANDARD)

As the memoir, Must You Go?, movingly proves, Pinter's love of women finally reached fulfilment in a marriage of true minds (Michael Billington WATERSTONES BOOKS QUARTERLY)

It is neither authobiography nor biography but a love story, romantic, poignant and very funny, illuminating her husband's character and creativity (Valerie Grove THE TIMES)

Antonia Fraser's memoir of her life with Harold Pinter, Must You Go?, is extraordinary by any standards. Based on the diaries she kept during her 33-year relationship with the dramatist, it is simultaneously a love story, an intimate portrait of a great writer and an exercise in self-revelation (Michael Billington THE GUARDIAN)

This book - full of funny and tender things - satisfies on more than one level. It is an intimate account of the life and habits of a major artist; it is a pencil sketch of British high society in the second half of the 20th century; and it is, more than either of these things, and much more unusually, a wonderfully full description of the deep pleasures and comforts of married love (Sam Leith SPECTATOR)

Addictive and affecting as an account of a 33-year-old love affair, with walk-on parts for Vaclav Havel, Salman Rushdie, The Princess of Wales and many others, it is memorable for its intimate vignettes (James Fergusson COUNTRY LIFE)

After 33 years, he [Pinter] remained as besotted with Antonia Fraser as he had always been. He would write her poems, send her flowers, buy her presents...Here, astonishingly, was the Mr Darcy of Campden Hill Square: forbidding and combustible on the outside, gentle and tender at home (James Preston EVENING STANDARD)

Pinter's first diagnosis with cancer of the oesophagus came on 13 December 2001, soon after that public "Fall" of 11 September. Fraser traces the "steps downwards" through the eight ensuing years of sporadic anguish and relief with exemplary clarity and courage....Fraser keeps her gaze steady and her heart open (Boyd Tonkin THE INDEPENDENT)