“He made a starry reputation first as a satirist, writing a bracingly funny column for the Guardian in the early 1960s. His first novels, all five of them comedies, none of which sold well, won critical plaudits (The Russian Interpreter scooped the Hawthornden Prize in 1967), while his philosophy tome, Constructions, a series of 309 numbered thoughts (‘you can’t live in the present any more than you can live in the border between Kent and Sussex’), set him in territory occupied by the century’s greatest thinkers (Frayn read moral sciences at Cambridge).”