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Sir Richard Eyre was Artistic Director of the Royal National Theatre for ten years. He has directed numerous classic plays, new films (most recently Iris, for which he co-wrote the screenplay) as well as the BAFTA award-winning BBC drama Tumbledown. His first book, the memoir Utopia and Other Places, was first published by Bloomsbury in 1993. Changing Stages, the acclaimed guide to twentieth-century British theatre, appeared in 2000. his voice brings unrivalled insight into the famous and the powerful. As Director of the Royal National Theatre from 1987 to 1997, Richard Eyre kept a diary (a record that disarmingly captured a life at the heart of British cultural and political affairs. The powerful and the famous inevitably strut and fret upon its pages, but National Service is also a moving personal journey, charted faithfully by a fiercely self-aware and frequently self-doubting individual. The job of grappling with a giant three-headed monster as complex as the Royal National Theatre is laid before us. So are good gossip, brilliant insights into personalities and relationships and a sense of the ridiculous, which Eyre is powerless to suppress. Like other consummate diarists such as Alan Clark and Kenneth Tynan, Richard Eyre has a voice and point of view that jolt the reader into fresh understanding) and are instantly compelling.