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hospital visits. Harold even managed to come to Nixon in China, the John Adams piece we both loved, for the second time, which, whatever it cost him, was a gesture of faith. Adams is worthy to be compared with Verdi in grandeur of imagination (actually I think Harold prefers John Adams!). He also managed to speak at a Human Rights event at the Royal Court, reading ‘Death’ and also – what a pleasure! – encountering václav Havel again. Interviewed by Kirsty Wark for Newsnight, he was accused of pessimism by the frisky Kirsty (whom by the way he likes otherwise he wouldn’t do the interview, despite being furious that BBC 2 ignored his Nobel Speech). Harold replied: ‘Life is beautiful but the world is Hell!’ Which more or less sums up Harold’s philosophy. Prompted by Kirsty, he quoted ‘To My Wife’: ‘I was dead and now I live …’ and listening in the box, I felt the familiar pricking of my eyes when that poem is quoted.

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Our summer holiday at Westbrook House, an eighteenth-century house on the outskirts of Weymouth (dating from the time that George III made the town fashionable for sea-bathing). It was dominated by the question of Harold doing Krapp’s Last Tape. I say ‘the question’ because it was by no means certain that someone who was in a lot of pain a lot of the time and very weak, who also had real difficulty in walking, was in a fit state to conduct a forty-minute monologue on the stage of the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. Since there are frequent references in my Diary to Harold’s ‘pessimism’, there also ought to be tributes to his more-or-less unconquerable will when he believed he could perform something. In this case Krapp’s Last Tape brought together Harold’s feeling for Beckett with the desire he had had since he was sixteen to be an actor. Throughout all this time Ian Rickson behaved with great sensitivity, privately assuring me that the performance didn’t have to take place – even though it had sold out within five minutes of the short run being announced: ‘Listen, we can always cancel.’

18 July

Celestial and cerulean day at Lord’s. Total happiness (of eighteen people). Total cost: £8000. It was Benjie’s idea that Harold should celebrate the Nobel Prize by taking a box at Lord’s – ‘something for yourself,’ he said winningly. And of course for the cricket-loving family. The blue of the sky, the beauty of the vigorous yet serene scene, ineffable. Of the grandsons, Simon Soros and Thomas Fraser came.

25 July

Westbrook House: the most beautiful, comfortable, well-arranged house. Lots of ducks led by a long-necked one, which flock across the lawn towards the house if a door opens, asking for food. Many granddaughters staying: hard-working fathers are seen running past in some complicated game of rescue. Hard-working mothers appear to be taking the opportunity to relax.

15 August

Visit of Ian Rickson left Harold very exhausted the next day but much less depressed. Ian to me: ‘He worries about whether he’s good enough and I worry about whether he’s strong enough.’ The news from Lebanon in the meantime depresses all our spirits.

24 August

Harold’s breathlessness: he pants heavily even to stretch out for a card at bridge. What is happening? Going for a walk is a thing of the past.

25–26 August

Edinburgh Book Festival. The frail figure of Harold, who was helped on stage, turned before our eyes into one, or rather two brutal interrogators as Harold did the famous scene questioning Stanley from The Birthday Party, as a prelude to discoursing on his own political views (he says he’s bored with reading his War Poems). Full of force. Everyone felt privileged because most people seemed to have studied The Birthday Party at school … and here was the author himself. I spoke about Love and Louis XIV, which was published more or less at the same time as the Festival.

Through the autumn during rehearsals there were at least two episodes where Harold got chest pains and had to be rushed home from the Royal Court.

11 October

Harold’s Dress Rehearsal was actually a full house of many distinguished people in the