Osborne was originally one of the Angry Young Men generation, of whom Brendan Behan remarked: "They're about as angry as `Mrs Dale's Diary.' " The title of his autobiography, of course, refers to his play, Look Back in Anger - a work on which I can only look back in boredom, since I tried to sit through its Dublin premiere (I think at the Olympia) but gave up at the last act. Osborne died in 1994, so this book was published posthumously - all 592 pages of it. Osborne himself comes over as a rather shallow careerist, a social climber and a chronic namedropper; but the anecdotes, the parade of half-remembered personalities, the glimpses behind stage, and the evocation of an epoch which has suddenly become distant, give his book just enough piquancy to make it worth reading (provided, of course, that you know how to skip frequently).