But those who misrepresent him as an untalented fool are in a colder place. Citizens in a robust democracy should all be able to watch him demolish a prime minister and a president and decide for themselves whether he is right or wrong. Chief among those foes is Hitchens, who called him 'a writer of doggerel, a very poor man's Beckett ... a bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long'. Eliot's passenger manifest for outer darkness, 'the captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters', could now be extended to include Harold Pinter. Torture and war crimes, no longer the province of mouthy playwrights and far-off demagogues, are too close to home for anyone's comfort. His political model, like Bush's, is one of good and evil, in which two adversaries scream abuse across a shattering world. Instead, Pinter's refusal to compromise has left him marginalised, 'open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed'. The demonising of Pinter reflects the worst of Britain. He is often quixotic, and on the Balkans he was very wrong, but he has explicitly been awarded this prize for his art and not his personal politics. Such insults do Pinter no favours. But when I eventually arrived, he had uncorked some wine and page-marked one of Eliot's Four Quartets. T he Nobel prize for literature was awarded yesterday to Harold Pinter.Someone else collected it because he was too sick to travel to Stockholm, but his … Media lassitude was certainly odd in an age so avid for icons that glory awaits anyone eating a kangaroo's testicle on live TV. But Pinter's enemies, in echoing Mrs Beckett, who cried: 'Quelle catastrophe, tu as gagné', on learning of her husband's victory, are not thinking of the thin reputation of past laureates. Nor is he vainglorious. He has laid himself open to apologists for the Iraq war whose onslaughts on Pinter save them mentioning any error on their part. STOCKHOLM, 13 October 2005 —This year's Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the 75-year-old British playwright Harold Pinter. I met him only once. Pinter, in his critics' eyes, is as over as Westlife and as cantankerous as a Dubonnet-fuelled aunt, dashing off missives against a 'mass-murdering' prime minister and the US president, to whom he composed this awful note. They all go into the dark The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.' Pinter, though free to say what he likes, has shouted the best speech of his flagging life into the darkness that haunts him. In 2005, Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest honour available to any writer in the world. He was disgraceful in his misreading of Slobodan Milosevic. 'Dear President Bush, I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Along with John Osborne, he dragged theatre out of the drawing room and into the bedsit, the battlefield and the torture chamber. One columnist, echoing Christopher Hitchens' grand polemic on the 'sinister mediocrity' of Harold Pinter, denounced the playwright's 'Nobel rant' even before it had been recorded. Pinter's speech would have been restricted to the satellite channel, More4, had Channel 4 not decided, at the last minute, to put out a midnight digest. He had not wanted to do the interview, faxing sick notes like a third-former trying to get off swimming ('I have a chest infection. They are livid that the prize has gone to a man they revile, partly because they dare not think he is more right than they are. While he lends his characters freedom to develop as they will, he sees politicians who displease him as monofocal tyrants, conniving wilfully at murder. In announcing the award, Horace Engdahl, Chairman of the Swedish Academy, said that Pinter was an artist “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”. David Hare, who listened to Pinter compose his speech in his hospital bed, thinks the BBC's omission 'disgraceful'. Someone else collected it because he was too sick to travel to Stockholm, but his wider absence cannot be explained by illness. Now 75, Pinter cannot walk after an illness unrelated to the oesophageal cancer from which he rallied. Pinter is a worthy victor. True, his rage sometimes impairs his judgment. His plays, he explained, began with one word. It isn't simply that the public thinks such tasks better left to Ant and Dec, for the Booker is hyped like Strictly Come Dancing. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments. For Old Times it was 'Dark', a staple of Pinter's vocabulary. To damn Pinter's artistic work along with his politics is absurd. The Nobel prize has not always gone to such worthy figures. Pinter's dissection of ordinary lives made him the first prophet of the reality show. Pinter has become the Macavity of English letters. Pinter's error is to play their game. But he is a worthy Nobel prizewinner, he Nobel prize for literature was awarded yesterday to. Harold is not dying, his friends insist, but the shadow of death - his own or other people's - is never far away. Pinter, often a bad advocate for a good cause, has frequently seemed more useful to his enemies than his friends. His voice clotted in his throat as he rasped out a message so thick with death that he seemed to be uttering his own eulogy. The Academy has picked some shockers. Few writers knew less about the ordinary man, yet captured him more perfectly. Apart from the Guardian's reprinting of the speech, press coverage was scant or mean. All he has tried to do, besides writing some of the best plays of the last century, is to rail against injustice. In announcing the award, Horace Engdahl, Chairman of the Swedish Academy, said that Pinter was an artist "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." Harold Pinter.' He got no mention on either of the main television news programmes. He has done fine work on human rights, in Nicaragua and in Turkey. On Wednesday morning, the finest living British playwright recorded, from his wheelchair, an acceptance speech for the greatest literary prize on earth. For that, he has won the honour once conferred on V S Naipaul and Seamus Heaney. And besides, he is more prescient than his detractors ever allow. Newsnight, voracious for culture, carried nothing.

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