Someone described him as the Mother Teresa of economics. Amartya Sen is a tiny Indian intellectual brimming with erudition, energy, commitment and words. Words toppling over each other effusively, about famines, about freedom, about choice, about philosophy.
He has written prodigiously: On Economic Inequality, Poverty and Famines, On Ethics and Economics and more than 30 other books. Last month he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
It was a welcome change. Last year the award went to Robert Merton of Harvard and Myron Scholes of Stanford for their pioneering formula for the valuation of stock options. The previous year the award went to Hames Mirrless of Cambridge University and William Vickrey of Columbia University for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine went to three American pharmacologists, Robert Furchgott, Ferid Murad and Louis Igarro, for their discoveries concerning a gas that transmits signals in the human organism. Their discoveries have been significant for the treatment of heart disease and cancer.
The 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Walter Kohn, an American, and John Pople from Britain. They won for pioneering contributions in developing methods which can be used for theoretical studies of the properties of molecules. Robert McLaughlin, Horst Stormer and Daniel Tsui, all Americans, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for work in quantum physics.
The Portuguese writer Jose Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Aged 76 now, he did not have any success as a writer until he was 60 and since then he has published several major works, including the Gospel according to Jesus Christ, a novel in which God and the devil negotiate about evil.
John Hume was one of the co-recipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace. The citation said of him: has throughout [the 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland] been the clearest and most consistent of Northern Ireland's political leaders in his work for a peaceful solution. The foundations of the peace agreement signed on Good Friday 1998 reflect principles which he has stood for.
And then there was David Trimble.
By what measure does David Trimble deserve to be in the category of those to whom Nobel prizes were awarded this year? What service to humanity, to literature, to science or to peace has he given to exalt him to such eminence?
The citation said of him: as leader of the traditionally predominant party in Northern Ireland, David Trimble showed great courage when, at a critical stage of the process, he advocated solutions which led to the peace agreement. As the head of the Northern Ireland government, he has taken the first steps towards building up the mutual confidence on which a lasting peace must be based.
What courage, what solutions did he advocate, what first steps towards building up mutual confidence?
The crisis in the peace process now arises almost entirely because David Trimble does not have the political courage, does not have the solutions and will not take the first or any steps towards building mutual confidence. And nowhere is this more evident than in his article in Monday's Irish Times.
In that article he seized on a sentence from an article the previous Thursday, also in The Irish Times, by Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein.
Mr McGuinness had written: The [Belfast] agreement is not a peace settlement.
And he went on at length explaining exactly what he meant by that. He wrote that the Belfast Agreement left many issues in abeyance: human rights, policing, justice, equality in all its dimensions, decommissioning and the demilitarisation of society. He wrote of how central the resolution of these issues is to a lasting peace settlement.
In his response of Monday, however, David Trimble seized on the sentence in which McGuinness says the agreement is not a peace settlement, claiming that this establishes the mala fides of Sinn Fein in relation to the agreement. There was no acknowledgment that McGuinness had carefully explained precisely what he had meant by that sentence and that that explanation was both convincing and unthreatening.
The entirety of the Trimble response is constructed on what I believe to be a misrepresentation of what McGuinness had written. Why would Trimble do this?
If he were conscientiously trying to find a resolution to the current impasse over decommissioning and the participation of Sinn Fein in the new executive, surely he would be seeking ways to soften the standoff with Sinn Fein? Instead, he seems intent on seeking means of hardening that standoff.
He is already in a pickle, of course, over his position on the agreement. The agreement clearly does not link IRA decommissioning to Sinn Fein's participation in the executive. Therefore, in insisting that Sinn Fein cannot be part of the executive until IRA decommissioning takes place, Trimble is in breach of the agreement.
He maintains this position precisely because he lacks those qualities for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace - the capacity to find solutions and to take first steps and, above all, courage.
It has been the problem with Trimble all along. At no stage did he courageously go to his constituency as Adams and McGuinness and, of course, John Hume, did, and attempt to convince them that substantial compromises had to be made to achieve peace and reconciliation. He left his constituency unprepared for the changes required and he is now trapped in a corner created by his lack of courage.
Martin McGuinness's article last Thursday was, in fact, a reassuring signal that Sinn Fein is now very much tied into the agreement. He twice stated that the will of the people of Ireland as a whole, in their endorsement of the Agreement, could not be defied.
He also, and again significantly, repeated Gerry Adams's assertion that the violence we have seen must be for all of us now a thing of the past - over, done with and gone.
Trimble could have used the Martin McGuinness article for precisely the opposite purpose to which he put it. He could have said that McGuinness had offered renewed reassurance on Sinn Fein's commitment to peace, and that it was that issue, rather than any symbolic handing over by the IRA of arms, that was the true determinant of Sinn Fein's eligibility for executive office.
Unfortunately, our Nobel Peace Prize winner seems primarily interested in protecting his back and sides against those he has not even tried to convert within his own party. David Trimble's presence in the pantheon of 1998 prize winners is questionable.