"A master class in how private reckonings sometimes find their greatest resonance on the stage."
Megan O'Grady - Vogue "A highly articulate and probing self-examination that is at the same time a vivid cultural study of postwar Britain."
Charles McNulty - Los Angeles Times "An intelligent, unsentimental glimpse inside the creative process. . . . [A] sometimes abrasive, always engaging account of [Hare’s] changing dramatic ideals."
Wendy Smith - Washington Post "[Hare] has a lightness of touch and a casual eloquence that might surprise those familiar with [his] knotty, politically engaged dramas. . . . He also tosses in enough juicy backstage stories."
Charles Isherwood - New York Times "What’s extraordinary about The Blue Touch Paper is how much intellection and drama and sensibility and wit Mr. Hare squeezes into [it]. This is no butterfly-watching stroll through a life. Mr. Hare is a man who seizes on details and ideas, and who writes as if words matter."
Dwight Garner - New York Times "Wonderfully entertaining…. You have to admire Hare’s appetite to engage with his times with such savage gusto…. The Blue Touch Paper is an engrossing dive into the passions, the disappointments, the quarrels and the elation of a great professional trying to get something done."
Tina Brown - New York Times Book Review "The Blue Touch Paper encompasses exquisitely rendered love stories, rousing arguments about the relationship between art and politics, great gossip, and far, far more. A book that contained only one of those pleasures would be good news; a book that contains all of them is a legitimate treasure."
Michael Cunningham "Frank, moving, and beguiling, The Blue Touch Paper is the fascinating story of becoming a writer in the 1960s and ’70s when Britain was changing even faster than the author."
Joan Didion