22 JANUARY 2005, Page 17

when just read in the hash-room.

A revival of his fine play The Long Sunset is long overdue. Written in 1955, clearly nostalgic about the evening of empire, it would, today, provide an epitaph on a Britain (specifically on an all-but-vanished England) which, with all its faults, once seemed a source of justifiable pride to those born and bred there.

Ian Mertling-Blake Wester Ross, Scotland