what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man" (23–24). Critical response Pinter's Nobel Lecture has been the source of much discussion. In an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education on 11 November 2005, entitled "Pinter's Plays, Pinter's Politics," Middlebury College English professor Jay Parini observes that "In the weeks that have passed since Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature, there has been incessant chatter on both sides of the Atlantic, some of it unflattering," as "from the right, in particular, the American reaction to the Pinter award has been one of outrage," whereas "the reaction to the award from Pinter's peers––Michael Frayn, David Hare, Tom Stoppard, and others––has been uniformly positive"; in response to naysayers, Parini concludes: "it may be true this time around that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to the right man for the right reasons. Few writers in our time have demonstrated such a passionate concern for victims of oppression, whether in the family's living room or in the torturer's faraway bunker, as Harold Pinter. And few dramatists have been so vastly influential, transforming our basic sense of what happens when we enter a theater." In response to his videotaped Nobel Lecture broadcast on More 4 and distributed via the internet, heated critical debate about Pinter spiked in the public media and spread throughout the blogosphere. Such criticism of Pinter encompassed thousands of commentaries and focused mostly on his political activism, particularly his purported "anti-Americanism" and his generally "leftist" views. Pinter's official, authorised biographer, Michael Billington observes that "the reactions to Pinter's Nobel Prize and Lecture" were "fascinating" and "overwhelmingly positive," though he thinks "it is worth picking out the few negative ones" as examples. He observes, "The most startling fact was that Pinter's Nobel Lecture on 7 December was totally ignored by the BBC", adding: "You would have thought that a living British dramatist's views on his art and global politics might have been of passing interest to a public service broadcaster"; yet "There was ... no reference to the speech on any of BBC TV's news bulletins that night or indeed on its current affairs programme, Newsnight" (Harold Pinter 424). While "in the press, there was also a handful of attacks on both the award and the Lecture," Billington dispatches criticisms by three of them: "the normally sensible Johan Hari", who "dismissed the Lecture in