Talking in the Library - Series Four

Stephen Bayley
Stephen Bayley is the British design guru who takes his vision of industrial creativity into the realm of aesthetics. He isn't automatically convinced by the next twist of fashion in interior decorating and if he doesn't like some overpriced maniac's latest brainwave in moulded plastic furniture he may try to attack it with a road drill. On the other hand nobody is more susceptible to the functional beauty of aircraft and automobiles, a passion I share with him, although he has a sympathy with Detroit-style stylistic extravagance that can sometimes worry me almost as much as my random selection of socks must worry him. I already found him admirable before he walked off the job of filling Britain's ill-fated Millennium Dome, on the grounds that somebody should have figured out what the thing was for before it was put up. He has the knack of getting in ahead of everybody with values that turn out to be permanent. The only problem is to slow him down.

Richard E. Grant
Richard E. Grant became everybody's favourite British upmarket eccentric actor as the tall one in Withnail and I. Even Hollywood could tell he was from Britain. He was in fact from Swaziland, but that made him more Empire than anybody. Secretly powering his gift for droll comedy was a deep sense of personal unease stemming from his childhood. The story began to surface in his first book of diaries — With Nails — and in his novel about Hollywood By Design. Both books were disturbingly well written if you happened to be a writer. But the full story came out, and his writing reached even deeper, with the script for the movie he directed, Wah Wah. His book of the movie, The Wah Wah Diaries, is a real contribution to the vexed subject of imperial twilight, as well as being a deliciously entertaining account of a movie on the brink of disaster. The average film star is an ego on the loose. So is the average writer. Put them together and what do you get?

Michael Frayn
Michael Frayn rules at the pinnacle of the unclassifiable. When he writes a book of philosophy, he is a philosopher; when he writes a play, he is a playwright; when he writes a novel, he a novelist. In every category he is somebody’s favourite among modern writers, but what unites his work across all the categories is a linguistic fastidiousness simultaneously both poetic and critical. People who praise him in such solemn terms, however, are in danger of being reminded that he is also a master of comedy. He has been quietly scaring the vests off his generation of writers since he first proved how much he had to burn with his Guardian column in the early 1960s. From Cambridge and national Service he seemed to arrive at the peak of Fleet Street by rocket. After a detour into television he became such a permanent force in the theatre that by now a new Frayn play seems always ready to succeed another, and its subject will illuminate a whole modern historical area when it isn't a knock-down drag-out farce. Can an ordinary man live with the uncertainty of quantum mechanics? Can a physicist retain his trousers? Such questions intermingle also in his novels, which arrive either between, or simultaneously with, the plays.

Posy Simmonds
Posy Simmonds is to the top-of-the-range British comic strip what Gary Trudeau is to the American equivalent: the exalted benchmark. But Posy's world is a long way from Doonesbury, and far closer to Bloomsbury, although she would be quick to point out that she's more interested in the socially aspiring than in the socially secure. The British genteel would-be intelligentsia, with all its nervous self-confidence and all its lonely self-doubt, is one of her best areas. Her knack for overheard dialogue has led some scientists to contend that her ears revolve and go beep-beep. But perhaps I, like so many writers, praise her words because we don't know how to praise her pictures. Her uncanny graphic skill, with whole states of mind conveyed by a dot and a stroke, is beyond us. How does she do that?

Ronald Harwood
Ronald Harwood came from South Africa to be an actor in London. After a voice-lift at RADA he ended up dressing an actor, Sir Donal Wolfit, and Harwood's play about that experience, The Dresser, established him immediately in the top flight of British theatre, where he continues to rank along with Pinter, Stoppard, Nichols, Frayn, Simon Gray and others. Several of them write screenplays as a successful second career, but Harwood put the lid on it by winning a well-deserved Oscar for the script of The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski. Harwood's stage play The Dividing Line, about the moral dilemma of the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler under the Nazis, had already established the playwright's credentials as an analyst of recent European history at its most blood-curdling, but The Pianist went where not even he had yet gone, into the pit of unpalliated horror. With more on similar subjects yet to come, Harwood is way out in front in his role as that rarest type of writer, the cool spellbinder with hot ashes for a subject. How did he get like that?