His numerous full-length and one-act plays, among them "The Room," " The Hothouse," and "Moonlight" (in 1993, his first full-length drama in 15 years) were described by critics as "comedies of menace," depicting characters alienated from each other within layers of meaning produced by pauses and silence.

At 75, he is among the oldest who have received the Nobel Prize, along with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the irrepressible satirist George Bernard Shaw, and Boris Pasternak and Jean Paul Sartre, who both rejected the Prize during the Cold War.

Like Sartre, Pinter (whom media credited with popularizing the term "Pinteresque") turned to political commentary in his mature years. A critic of the Iraq invasion, he said, "I believe the US is a truly monstrous force in the world, now off the leash for obvious reasons." But, of course, that’s not cited by the Royal Swedish Academy.

Worth citing, though, is his cryptic, "In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?"

From our angle, however, there are still two things: The known unknown and the unknown known. These two things are evident in all the jittery talk and bombastic rhetoric about "economic emergency," martial law, CPR, which, as verbal diarrhea, are better described as the sounds of stentorian silence.

Psychiatrists could describe the TV performances of officials as a case of psychogenic amnesia, for they remember only what they are saying in the instant moment as if they had not said something else five minutes before. The endless permutations of the term, "emergency" attest to the pathology of misused power. Curiously, however, it’s the protesters who are accused of having an "unquenchable thirst for power."

But possibly the accusers, having slaked their thirst, want to savor it.