Here are the last three grafs for those of you who can’t get through the firewall:

Even in his increasingly lame and slovenly literary output, Mr. Pinter always married politicization to illiteracy. His useless play “Mountain Language,” extruded about a dozen years ago, drew attention to the plight of the Kurdish people but lost interest in them as soon as the subject crossed the border of the NATO alliance: Turkish Kurds were fine but Mr. Pinter would fight like a madman against any attempt to liberate their brothers and sisters in Iraq. Mildly rebuked by the American ambassador in London for “calling the U.S. administration a blood-thirsty wild animal” (I quote from Mr. Pinter’s own narrative here) he replied: “All I can say is: Take a look at Donald Rumsfeld’s face and the case is made.” All he can say? Alas, yes. I have my own differences with the secretary of defense but this rhetoric is pathetic and nasty at the same time.
A luxurious literary/political salon, established by Mr. Pinter and his noble wife Lady Antonia Fraser to protest the Gulag-like character of the Thatcher regime, is often said to have dissolved because of unkind media ridicule. To the contrary: I know many people who used to attend that “salon,” and I can tell you that it dissolved because of the irrational rages and hysterical harangues of its host, now garlanded for his services to the high calling of letters.
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Is this depressing? I happen not to think so. The Nobel judges have again given their approval to a writer of doggerel; a very poor man’s Beckett, a man most celebrated for the long silences that punctuated his stage “dialogue,” who would have no reputation of any kind if it were not for the slightly unbelievable character of his public statements. Let us hope, then, that the day when the Nobel Prize is a local and provincial event has been brought closer. Especially in their opinions about peace and literature — two matters that ought to concern all serious people — the judges have brought absurdity upon themselves. Let us withdraw our assent from their fool’s-gold standard, and see what happens. Let us also hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long.