Michael Billingtons engrossing biography examines Pinters work in the context of his life. Through extended conversations with Pinter and interviews with his friends and colleagues, Billington creates a portrait of the man as well as the artist, from Pinters Hackney childhood to his Nobel Prize, discussing his writing for stage and screen, as well as his fiction and poetry, his acting and directing, his political activity, his friendships, his two marriages and his passion for cricket. He emerges as a man of infinite complexity whose imaginative world is shaped by his private character. This new edition includes a full transcript of the Nobel lecture, as well as an additional chapter written in the aftermath of Harold Pinters death in December 2008. The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century. The Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005Enthralling An open-sesame into Pinters work A valuable book. And absorbing: I found it virtually unputdownable. Financial TimesNo reader of this book will doubt that its subject is a man of the highest artistic stature. Sunday Telegraph