British playwright Noël Coward’s plays and musicals are in continuous production around the world, including Thea Sharrock’s current West End revival of Blithe Spirit at the Apollo Theatre, starring Alison Steadman.

Here, journalist and author Clive Hirschhorn remembers a meeting with the ‘Master’ in the 1960′s, an immodest encounter in which the man offered an opinion on just about everything.

Maggie B Gale’s excellent book West End Women: Women and the London stage 1918 – 1962 reveals the vital place of women playwrights within West End theatre history.

Hugh Beaumont, famously known as Binkie Beaumont, was one of the most powerful West End theatre managers in his, or any other, generation.