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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 published by Bloomsbury in 1993. Changing Stages, the acclaimed guide to twentieth-century British Theatre, appeared in 2000. National Service is the diary he kept as Director of the Royal National Theatre from 1987 to 1997. It is a record that disarmingly captured a life at the heart of British cultural and political affairs. The job of grabbling with a giant three-headed monster as complex as the Royal National Theatre is laid before us; so is good gossip, brilliant insights into personalities and relationships, and a sense of the ridiculous which Eyre is powerless to suppress. His voice brings unrivalled insight into the famous and the powerful.