Regi Siriwardena

His Macaulay-quoting father sent him for his schooling first to St. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia where he found the Anglican elite colonial atmosphere uncomfortable.

Here he worked among fellow left or leftish intellectuals such as Herbert Keuneman, Bonny Fernando and Jeanne Hoban, who had been head-hunted by the shrewd Wickremasinghe.

In the early 1960s, the closeness of Lake House to the right-wing United National Party caused Siriwardena to leave journalism, the specific instance being a cartoon by Aubrey Collette showing Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Dr. N.M. Perera together in a vulgar embrace, which he considered to be in poor taste.

In the mid 1970s, at the Curriculum Development Centre of the Ministry of Eductation, Siriwardena collaborated in the introduction of a controversial new English literature syllabus for the Advanced Level which, to the consternation of the conservatives, included the lyrics of Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind, which replaced Shakespeare.

In 1988, at a seminar organised by the British Council, Colombo Siriwardena debunked the reputation of TS Eliot, arguing that the technical mastery in his poetry concealed a poverty of experience and a narrow range of sympathies; that in his work creative powers are expanded on negative emotions of repulsion and disgust, springing from personal malaise (snobbery, misogyny and anti-Semitism); and that he was a great literary engineer rather than a great poet.