Don't look back in anger

In the Guardian, Blake Morrison has only good things to say for Antonia Fraser's Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter: "the book is intimate without being confessional . . . But she's not so discreet as to be dull." He believes that "[Pinter's] wishes have been honoured in this book, which is less flowery than most elegies have a right to be, one year on". Robert Harris in the Sunday Times concedes that the book "certainly has at times a bosom-heaving, lace-handkerchief-fluttering quality", but is concerned at how Pinter's first wife and son are treated "with chilling contempt". Charles Spencer, in the Telegraph, describes it as a "moving and compellingly readable memoir", which is written "with palpable love, warmth, affection and a huge sense of loss . . . the book is deeply moving in its closing section, following Pinter's cancer diagnosis in 2001".

One-trick pony?

For Jay Parini in the Guardian, the novelist and critic Edmund White's New York memoir, City Boy, is "the story of sexuality run amok, detached from love, caught in its own whirligig of mindless sensual motion . . . [White] takes us into the 1960s and 70s, describing Manhattan life in those tumultuous decades with a compulsive, self-revelatory energy." To Nicholas Shakespeare in the Telegraph, it is "at bottom, an old-fashioned period piece about a fascinating period". Despite flashes of White at his best, Shakespeare "wanted to like the result more than I did. Too often I found myself wondering if he had mistaken candour for truth or if his characters were one-trick ponies overly defined by their sexuality."