He has spent his life opposing war. So what, asks lewis jones, is Harold Pinter doing picking up a blood-stained Nobel Prize?
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The Nobel Prize for Literature is often puzzling - recent winners have included such household names as Wislawa Szymborska, Gao Zingjian and Elfrieda Jelinek - but this week's award to Harold Pinter is doubly mysterious.
Why has the Swedish Academy decided to honour a rich, old curmudgeon from Holland Park, whose best work was written half a century ago?
Is it because his celebrated style - the interminable pauses, the circular repetitions - is comprehensively lifted from Samuel Beckett, who won the prize in 1969?The Academy has called Pinter the best British dramatist of the second half of the 20th century, but Stoppard, Frayn and Bennett are surely better - more interesting, original and entertaining.
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| The Swedish Academy says Pinter is the best British dramatist, but Stoppard, Frayn and Bennett are surely better |
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Perhaps the Swedes are impressed by his lifelong, and increasingly violent, opposition to war. After all, he refused to do National Service in 1949, and has called President Bush "a mass murderer". Pinter says his conscientious objection to war dates from his boyhood evacuation from his native Hackney to escape the Blitz. "The condition of being bombed," he has said, "has never left me."
One wonders why, then, he is willing to accept a prize founded by Alfred Nobel, whose fortune was built on weapons technology. Following in the footsteps of his father, Immanuel, who devised the sea-mines used by the Russians in the Crimean War, Alfred invented dynamite and various cannons and rockets, used to kill millions in wars ever since. Would Pinter accept a prize from Krupps or Vickers?
No doubt he has his reasons - 730,000 or so of them - but to the impartial observer the fortune he has just added to his own looks very like blood money. As he recently said to Bush: "Look in the mirror, chum." 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 14
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