Bruni de la Motte writes: Harold Pinter (obituary, 27 December) always looked a forbidding figure, but when I interviewed him for the German daily Neues Deutschland some years back, he was charming and affable. Over a bottle of claret, we talked for over an hour.

I was also with him at his last public appearance on 11 September. He had asked me to help him climb the steps at the Venezuelan embassy's cultural centre at Bolívar Hall in central London, where he had agreed to read two of his recent poems at a fundraising evening for the Venezuela Information Centre. Despite his physical frailty, his powerful voice reverberated around the hall like that of a much younger man, and captivated his devoted audience. His passion for justice, and hatred of political hypocrisy and of American global policing were undimmed.

Tim Heald writes: Some years ago, helping Charles Sturridge and Gillian Tindall put on The Sentence is Silence, a one-off Sunday fundraiser for the writers' organisation Pen, I was offered the chance of including a brief two-handed piece of Pinter's directed by the author and starring Alan Bates and Anna Quayle.

When I read it, I thought it was likely to prove an embarrassment, consisting almost exclusively of silence and obscenity. Pinter being Pinter I was over-ruled. I remember creeping into the back of the theatre for rehearsals and being mesmerised by the blistering drama on stage. For the audience that evening it was a brilliant example of the playwright's work. For me it was an education in genius.