The Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir - Hardcover

Hare, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571294332 ISBN 13: 9780571294336

Publisher: Faber & Faber Non-Fiction, 2015

Synopsis

Born in 1947, David Hare is one of Britains foremost playwrights and screenwriters. With warmth, humour, and characteristically dazzling prose, this memoir vividly evokes his Anglo-Catholic upbringing in a suburban Hastings as vanished as Victorian England, against the backdrop of a time in which faith in empire, Christianity, hierarchy and deference were being swept away. It also charts his early struggles to become a writer - and the high price he and those around him paid for that decision.

About this title

About the Author

David Hare is the author of 30 full-length plays for the stage, seventeen of which have been presented at the National Theatre. They include Racing Demon, Skylight, Amy's View, The Blue Room and Stuff Happens. His many screenplays for film and television include The Hours, The Reader, Page Eight, Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield.

Review

“A master class in how private reckonings sometimes find their greatest resonance on the stage.”
- Megan O'Grady, Vogue

“A highly articulate and probing self-examination that is at the same time a vivid cultural study of postwar Britain.”
- Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

“An intelligent, unsentimental glimpse inside the creative process. . . . [A] sometimes abrasive, always engaging account of [Hare’s] changing dramatic ideals.”
- Wendy Smith, Washington Post

“[Hare] has a lightness of touch and a casual eloquence that might surprise those familiar with [his] knotty, politically engaged dramas. . . . He also tosses in enough juicy backstage stories.”
- Charles Isherwood, New York Times

“What’s extraordinary about The Blue Touch Paper is how much intellection and drama and sensibility and wit Mr. Hare squeezes into [it]. This is no butterfly-watching stroll through a life. Mr. Hare is a man who seizes on details and ideas, and who writes as if words matter.”
- Dwight Garner, New York Times

“Wonderfully entertaining.... You have to admire Hare’s appetite to engage with his times with such savage gusto.... The Blue Touch Paper is an engrossing dive into the passions, the disappointments, the quarrels and the elation of a great professional trying to get something done.”
- Tina Brown, New York Times Book Review

“The Blue Touch Paper encompasses exquisitely rendered love stories, rousing arguments about the relationship between art and politics, great gossip, and far, far more. A book that contained only one of those pleasures would be good news; a book that contains all of them is a legitimate treasure.”
- Michael Cunningham

“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

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber Non-Fiction
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0571294332
• ISBN 13: 9780571294336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368