Above All, Pinter Was Remarkable, Loyal Friend

He didn’t always like the plays of Harold Pinter, who died yesterday at 78, but Guardian theater critic Michael Billington says he’s sure they “will endure wind and weather, because he understood the insecurity of human life.” Billington, also Pinter’s biographer, remembers the “poet’s ear for language” and the way he “brilliantly skewered” political lies. But above all, Pinter “had a great talent for friendship and a remarkable sense of loyalty.”

"Harold was a great dramatist and screenwriter, a ferocious polemicist, a fighter against all forms of hypocrisy," Billington writes of the Nobel laureate. "What we should also remember today is his generosity of spirit and his rage for life." (More obituary stories.)