Mark Lawson has an interesting take on the revival of English identity in the Guardian today:
This new fashionability – indeed even political correctness – of militant Englishness is a consequence of the Iraq war and is what links Gromit with Pinter. Twenty years ago, when the playwright first turned against the British and American governments over their foreign policy, such vociferous opposition to the special relationship was widely considered maverick or treacherous. Now Pinter’s vilification of his own prime minister and the US president is broadly mainstream newspaper opinion, with only the Times consistently dissenting.
It doesn’t much matter – because Pinter has written at least five indelibly great plays – but paradoxically the politicians he most detests probably helped him win the Nobel. His fierce opposition to Blair and Bush and their Iraq adventures has cleansed him of the stain of colonialism or obsolescence that modern English writers have carried internationally.
In the list of Nobel laureates on the Swedish Academy website, "Harold Pinter" is followed by "(UK)". The Curse of the Were-Rabbit will go down in movie reference books as a US-UK co-production. But that’s wrong. Both are utterly and uncompromisingly English and that is what makes their astonishing success so interesting. (Guardian Unlimited)
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