There’s plenty more of this, some of it addressed angrily to leading figures in British theatre like George Devine and Tony Richardson.

It is pure Wesker. He was a difficult man. His memoir is full of run-ins, angry exchanges, feuds, bitterness and animosity. He was nearly expelled from school, had trouble during his National Service, had nasty fall-outs with Kingsley Amis, John Dexter, George Devine at the Royal Court (“Dear Arnold, forget it! Yours, George”), Pinter and Richard Eyre, when the latter was Director of the National Theatre. He describes writing to Pinter and asking, “What am I doing wrong?” Pinter didn’t respond.

These were not insignificant enemies. “I am an angry old man,” he wrote. “I feel like a leper, conscious of a furtive, embarrassed moving away, a shunning.” This is a recurring theme in the book. He didn’t seem to understand how much he offended people, often big players in the theatrical world, and that this might have consequences.

It has often been said that Wesker never reached the heights of his early work.  That is not entirely true. There were acclaimed revivals of his best plays at the Royal Court and at the National Theatre, and he wrote an outstanding TV drama, Love Letters on Blue Paper (1976). Had Zero Mostel lived to play Shylock in his play The Merchant in the 1970s and not died after one performance, perhaps that might have kick-started Wesker’s career on Broadway. “The play,” he wrote 20 years later, “was going to be a crowning glory for all three of us — Zero, [John] Dexter and myself.”

However, his heyday was brief. But that is also true of the New Left, the Angry Young Men and the golden age of Anglo-Jewish writing. Which of these names — apart from Pinter, of course — endured through the following decades? Wesker was not the only one to fall out of the limelight (although he was knighted in 2006). He was astonishingly prolific, continuing to pour out plays, around 50 in over half a century. But they gradually lost their appeal despite acclaimed revivals. This wasn’t a personal matter, although for decades he took it very personally indeed. It was a larger cultural change. That extraordinary moment was over in a few years. Arnold Wesker’s career looks very different when we see it in context.