J. C.'s article on Harold Pinter was published in the TLS of October 21, 2005.

The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Harold Pinter is notable for being the first Nobel to have been won by a member of the TLS cricket team. Many reports have made mention of Pinter's love of cricket, and a few referred to his regular squad, the Gaieties CC, which is made up largely but not exclusively of theatrical folk. The TLS poetry editor and fast-medium bowler M. O. Imlah has also featured in the Gaieties line-up, and Pinter returned the compliment by opening the batting for the TLS in the mid-1980s. "Pinter relished the quick stuff early on", our cricket historian says, confirming anecdotal reports about the laureate's temperament. If Pinter plays fast, he might also be said to play loose. His official top score for the Gaieties is 39 – a modest return for decades of effort – but his TLS best went into the forties. A memorable innings was distinguished by Pinter pulling a muscle and requiring a "runner", which (for the benefit of some readers) means that while the batsman plays the ball, it is the runner who skips between the wickets.

Pinter's study at home in West London is said to contain a set of the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack dating back to its beginnings in 1864. His hero is the great English batsman Len Hutton. "When I feel exhausted with it all and the world's sitting heavily on my head", he said recently, "I pick up a Wisden and read about Len Hutton's thirty-seven in twenty-four minutes in Sydney in 1946."

Not a lot of people know this – it is possible that Harold Pinter himself does not know it – but Len Hutton also took the field in a TLS cricket match, circa 1960, when he opened the batting for The Authors in the annual game sponsored by this paper against The Publishers. His partner at the crease was the late poet and editor of the London Magazine, Alan Ross. A photograph of the smiling pair making their way to the wicket hangs in the TLS office.

In addition to turning out for our cricket team, Pinter has on many occasions contributed poems to the TLS and, once, the text of a short play (Mountain Language, October 7, 1988). On May 15, 1981, we published his poem "Poem", the opening lines of which were doubtless in the minds of the Nobel Committee as they came to their decision last week:

The lights glow.
What will happen next?

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