Arthur Miller, 1915-2005

There has been so much written about Arthur Miller over the last couple of days that it seems a little superfluous to add anything else. I have seen his three greatest plays - Death Of A Salesman, The Crucible and A View From The Bridge - in various productions over the years. They are some of the finest dramatic writing of the contemporary theatre. In his mature plays, Miller was able to combine a devastating scalpel - able to dissect the psychological complexities of his protagonists - with a broad brush sensitivity to the wider dilemmas of social responsibility and community. He was also a great figure of moral conscience, having been politicised into the Left as a result of his family's experiences of the Depression and later by his principled opposition to the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 1950s that became the inspiration for The Crucible. "Most human enterprise disappoints", Miller once said. But his life and his work were wonderful triumphs.

There are tributes and obituaries all over the place but I was especially struck by those offered by Philip French and Michael Ratcliffe, while The Guardian did this profile eighteen months ago.