For the burgeoning file, All Things Stoppardian, here's an interview from all the way back in January from the London Evening Standard.
Tom Stoppard: My passion
Stoppard's wholehearted embrace of Englishness has become as much a part of his established persona as his autodidactic intellectual brilliance. He left Pocklington school at 17 to work as a reporter and drama critic for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, but after his first stellar stage success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1967, he bought into the whole package. Cricket, watercolours, country houses, first editions of Dickens, the lot. As his eminence grew — not just in theatre, radio and television but increasingly as an adapter and polisher of screenplays — there was the CBE, the knighthood, the Order of Merit.
His Englishness seems a sort of decorous carapace. It prevented any autobiographical detail from seeping into his early work, and prevents him ever discussing his two marriages, or his relationship in the Nineties with his sometime muse Felicity Kendal. It even, apparently, shielded him from self-examination or deferred grief when he learned, after his mother's death, that he is wholly Jewish and lost all four grandparents and three aunts in the Nazi death camps.
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