The Blue Touch Paper A Memoir Author:David Hare ?Frank, moving, and beguiling, The Blue Touch Paper is the fascinating story of becoming a writer in the 1960s and 70s when Britain was changing even faster than the author.??Joan Didion One of the best-known playwrights of our time delivers an astonishing debut: a vibrant and affecting account of becoming a writer amid the enormous flux of post... more »war England. In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humor, Hare (?Britain?s leading contemporary playwright,? Sunday Times) takes us from his university days at Oxford, where he found himself inspired by meeting Alfred Hitchcock; to the swinging London of the 1960s and his enormously influential Portable Theatre; to his breakthrough successes as a playwright in the 1970s. Through it all, Hare sets the progress of his own life against the dramatic changes in postwar England. Filled with indelible glimpses of such figures as Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, Julie Christie, and Joseph Papp, The Blue Touch Paper is a powerful evocation of a society in transition and a writer in the making. 8 pages of illustrations« less