David Hare’s memoir The Blue Touch Paper is rich with anecdotes, warmth and humour. When, in 2000, the National Theatre published its poll of the hundred best plays of the 20th century, David Hare had written five of them. Yet he was born in 1947 into an anonymous suburban street in Hastings. In The Blue Touch Paper with customary dazzling prose Hare describes a life of trial and error; his childhood, his Anglo-Catholic education and his painful apprenticeship to the trade of dramatist.