John Osborne's A Patriot for Me is about as unnecessary a play as I have ever seen. (p. 218)

Altogether, Osborne is a perfect example of a playwright who voices the mood of a particular moment in history: Look Back in Anger was, to a degree, the expression of English working-class anger against the upper classes, which at last could be reviled with impunity. But it was even more the venting of a self-destructive rage such as overtakes a country that sees itself fallen from political eminence to feeding on memories. And to men too young to have lived them, such memories become a source of especial irritation. Osborne had not so much written a play as tapped a vein.

But there was something that he genuinely possessed: a gift for raillery, invective, lacerating tirades whose victims could be anyone or anything, and whose power, though rhetorical rather than...