After the death of playwright Harold Pinter on Christmas Eve, 2008, the Guardian published the last interview he had given, earlier that year, with one of the paper’s journalists. Pinter spoke from his London home, mainly about one of the great passions of his life: cricket. Recalling the occasion, Andy Bull describes Pinter’s study as ‘heavy with the clutter of a cricket fan’, with shelves which ‘creaked under his cricket library, including all 145 editions of the Wisden Almanack’. As Bull points out, the appeal of cricket to one who writes plays is palpable, in its ‘endless potential for narrative, the games within a game’. Today the British Library revealed that those weighty Wisdens turned out to play a crucial role in another narrative – that of an important new acquisition of letters written by Pinter between 1948 and 1960. Sent to friends when Pinter was a young man, none of the letters came with a date, presenting a significant problem for the Library’s curators. But Pinter’s love for cricket – what he once described as ‘the greatest thing that God created on earth’ – is manifest throughout them, and his frequent cricketing references became invaluable clues. The curators cunningly matched these up with the details in Wisden volumes to identify dates for the letters, in an enviably neat synthesis of epistolary remains and contemporaneous material texts.