Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter, By Antonia Fraser

The recipe for a happy marriage? Stay for pudding

Lesley McDowell
Sunday 20 March 2011 01:00 GMT
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The title of Antonia Fraser's tribute to her late husband comes from a dinner party they both attended in 1975. As Fraser said goodbye to Pinter, he asked: "Must you go?". She decided to stay and, as she says here, perhaps if she hadn't, their relationship would never have happened.

Fraser is sensitive to the public's fascination with their affair (both parties were famously married at the time), and records her shock at being plunged into the red-top world of gossip, as well as her family's disapproval. Never does she doubt her feelings, though. Interestingly, theirs was not a literary attraction – on only one occasion did she and Pinter ever write in the same room together.

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