Exile is Mr Abdolah's recurring theme and, if language is a native land, his writing is a special homecoming.

ECONOMIST: Novels from the Netherlands

Can Kerry offer a compelling theme and a clear agenda, all in language non-political junkies can understand?

CNN: At stake Thursday: Crunch time for Kerry

Michael Savage, the number three radio host behind Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, trumpets his "borders, language, culture" theme to at least 8 million listeners 15 hours a week.

FORBES: Our Challenge Is Change, Not Globalization

This year the theme for Samoan Language Week is Samoa Ola: Samoa Active, focusing upon language, sport and healthy living.

UNESCO: samoan11_1.jpg

The second related theme we hear more and more of, again if you pass the rhetoric and pass the language coming out at the beginning of the 1980s, is that higher education should provide a possibility of upward mobility for talented individuals.

BBC: NEWS | UK | Education | Higher education 'market' warning

And now in "The Hothouse", written in 1958 but not staged until 1980, Mr Pinter plays the coarsest character of them all, Roote, the corrupt head of an indeterminate institution where the inmates and the staff are exploited to the point of torture and death, a theme he was to develop in a sparer and more political way in his later "Mountain Language".

ECONOMIST: From the archive