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Rueful is perhaps the best way to describe the British writer Simon Gray's rankling wit, which he has purveyed, over the decades, first from the West End stage and, most recently, from a series of hilarious, superbly written diaries. Gray is a sort of dandy of disappointments; for him, the light at the end of the tunnel is always an oncoming train. Listen to him meditate on the accusation that he brownnosed his way to the top, in his 2004 volume "The Smoking Diaries": "If only . . . I hadn't drunk so very much through my late forties, throughout my fifties, I might have--well, what? At least have got my plays returned more speedily by Trevor Nunn, for instance, possibly ...