. . . The Nobel Prize . . . for Literature . . . to Harold Pinter . . . Hmmm . . . there are two possibilities. First, the Nobel committee may have ruled that 2005 was the ideal moment to honour a man who wrote his signature works in the late 1950s. To be fair, Pinter produced notable plays in the succeeding decades. But he made his name, and gave birth to the adjective Pinteresque, with the stripped dialogue, edgy mistrust and air of tangible but mysterious threat of his early works.

Then there is another possibility: that Pinter is just about the biggest and sharpest stick with which the Nobel committee can poke America in the eye. His recent output has consisted almost entirely of rabid antiwar, anti-American and expletive-filled rants against the Iraq conflict. He did not like those in Afghanistan or Kosovo either. In his anger, which only occasionally verges on the coherent, Pinter is as spare with logic as he once was with language.

But there is hope — as an anti-Establishment figure who turned down a knighthood from John Major, Pinter will surely tell the committee where to stick their (expletive, expletive) prize. Surely it would be better to rename the Comedy Theatre in London — a more appropriate honour — after the new laureate. Or, as a fellow writer suggested, Pinter could change his name to Harold Comedy, and so save on the signage.

The list of authors who never won a Nobel is dazzling: Graham Greene, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Raymond Chandler, Henry James. As Pinter himself remarked when asked why he had won (after pausing): “I wonder, I wonder.”