Must You Go?

A unique testimony to modern literature’s most celebrated and enduring marriage.

‘I first saw Harold across a crowded room, but it was lunchtime, not some enchanted evening, and we did not speak.’

When Antonia Fraser met Harold Pinter she was a celebrated biographer and he was Britain’s finest playwright. Both were already married – Pinter to the actress Vivien Merchant and Fraser to the politician Hugh Fraser – but their union seemed inevitable from the moment they met: ‘I would have found you somehow’, Pinter told Fraser. Their relationship flourished until Pinter’s death on Christmas Eve 2008 and was a source of delight and inspiration to them both until the very end.

Fraser uses her Diaries and her own recollections to tell a touching love story. But this is also a memoir of a partnership between two of the greatest literary talents, with fascinating glimpses into their creativity and their illustrious circle of friends from the literary, political and theatrical world.