"The most meticulously logical and consistent of dramatists", as John Russell Taylor once described Harold Pinter in the TLS, has died – on Christmas Eve, at the age of seventy-eight.

Not only a playwright, but an actor, poet, political campaigner and cricket fanatic, Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 and announced that he was "unlikely" to write any more plays; at the time of his death, the West End was consoling itself with a revival of No Man's Land, following recent, highly acclaimed productions of The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, The Lover and The Collection. His reputation has never stood higher; and it may now be difficult to imagine a time when a critic could have advised him, as Taylor did in 1961, to try his hand at "marital comedy some time . . . his own version of Private Lives or George and Margaret".

Pinter's poems have appeared in the TLS, and Blake Morrison, Mark Ford, Alastair Macaulay and Lachlan Mackinnon are among those who have written about him in its pages; but perhaps it is also fitting to remember ("Harold Pinter's memorable innings", see below) that, like one of his heroes, the English batsman Len Hutton, Pinter was also once a member of the TLS cricket team . . . .

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