TIME SPENT with the playwright Ronald Harwood, who died on 8 September aged 85, was always a triple tonic. He exuded an infectious appetite for life, he seemed predisposed to like everyone he met, and he was easily moved to laughter.

But there was more to him than rollicking bonhomie. Born Ronald Horwitz, in South Africa, he had a near-obsession with moral dilemmas, and with what it meant to be a Jew. In his play Taking Sides, Hitler’s favourite conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, is tried after the war as a Nazi sympathiser. He is an artistic genius, whereas his American interrogator, Steve Arnold, is a bully and a philistine. Yet Arnold has witnessed at first hand the horror of Belsen. In the face of this, what argument can Furtwängler make for the healing power of his art?

As he prepared to write the Oscar-winning screenplay for The Pianist, Harwood and director Roman Polanski spent time together watching reels of previously unseen SS film of Nazi treatment of the Jews. “We watched all day,” he said, “and then went out for a huge dinner, and drank too much. We never talked about it, because it was unbearable.”