Reading this make me appreciate even more a writer whose biography I recently discovered and read. Mary Renault wrote some of the very early novels with gay life as a theme and was fairly successful. She also was a trained nurse and, with her companion, worked a brutal schedule during the war. In 1948, she and her companion, Julie, took a ship to South Africa to escape post war England and there she began her novels of ancient Greece. Some of those novels have been used by classical scholars as examples of daily life in classical and pre-classical Greece. She marched in protest to Apartheid and entertained gay actors and writers when it was not fashionable to do so. She was an Oxford graduate who went to nursing school and knew Tolkein as a don. As far as I am concerned, she is a far more important literary figure with her novels all in print 25 years after her death. I can do without Pinter although I will take your word for his importance in his little circle.