On 13 October 2005, the Swedish Academy announced that the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature was to be awarded to the English writer Harold Pinter. Pinter is best known for his 29 plays, written between 1957 and 2000, but he is also a screen-writer, theatre director, actor, poet and political activist. Five days earlier, enjoying a long weekend in Dublin, I had had the good fortune to attend a reading, by a particularly glittering cast, of Pinter's short play Celebration as part of the Gate Theatre's own celebration of …