Chiswick provided much creative inspiration for the young Harold Pinter. Ensconced in a tiny first-floor flat on Chiswick High Road with his wife, actress Vivien Merchant and their infant son Daniel in the late 1950s, Pinter had one of those moments of dramatic epiphany spoken of in his recent lecture Art, Truth & Politics.

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Raymond Chandler may have based many of his detective novels on the ‘mean streets’ of Los Angeles but his early days were spent at South London’s Dulwich College. As 2009 marks two anniversaries: his death in 1959 and the 1939 publication of The Big Sleep Amanda Hodges explores his links with the school.

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