SOURCE: Scammell, William. “Words and Silences.” Spectator 281, no. 8882 (31 October 1998): 50-1.

In the following review of Various Voices, Scammell asserts that Pinter is England's greatest living playwright.

Harold Pinter is far and away our greatest living playwright. What the plays tell us is that wherever two or more are gathered together there will be a top dog and a bottom dog, a seven-stone weakling and a king of the castle, a torrent of words and a club of silence. Down below liberty, equality, fraternity—ideals espoused by citizen Pinter in private life—there are ravenous appetites and power games, clenched fists and bovver boots, beaks that peck as often as they speak.

When he isn't writing plays, it appears that he is writing essays, stories, poems, novels (The Dwarfs, a clotted early piece of dark fabulation, appeared from Faber a few years ago), giving interviews, and writing journalism critical...