Beyond the Fringe of, in 1960, by an Oxford graduate, Robert Ponsonby, artistic director for the Edinburgh International Festival. John Bassett, a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford, who was Ponsonby's assistant, recommended Dudley Moore, his jazz bandmate and a rising cabaret talent. Moore in turn recommended Alan Bennett, who had had a hit at Edinburgh a few years before. Bassett also chose Jonathan Miller, who had been a Footlights star in 1957. Miller recommended Cook. Bennett and Miller were already pursuing careers in academia and medicine respectively, but Cook had an agent, having written a West End revue for Kenneth Williams. Cook's agent
Things: A Story of the Sixties of searching for truth and meaning. Things: A Story of the Sixties Things (French Les Choses) is a 1965 novel by Georges Perec, his first. The novel met with popular and critical success and won the Prix Renaudot in 1965. An authoritative English translation was published in a shared volume with "A Man Asleep". Recent French paperback editions, and the English translation, bear the subtitle "A Story of the Sixties" (fr. "Une histoire des années soixante"), though the original French edition did not. The characters in the novel do not hold as much textual importance as the things ("les choses")