Pinter and cricket

In The Guardian, Michael Henderson is prompted by an imminent revival of Guild member Harold Pinter's No Man's Land to reflect on the playwright's long-standing passion for cricket.

One day at drama school Pinter skipped classes to go to Lord's, running through the gate at the Nursery End to see Cyril Washbrook late-cutting for four. His abiding memory of that truant day, expressed in six simple words towards the end of that 1969 essay, is of an Eden familiar to all cricket-lovers: "that beautiful evening Compton made 70".

Is there a more evocative sentence in cricket literature? Even those who never saw Compton in his prime may feel, reading those words, that "I have known this before". It is one of those moments frozen in time.