And yet there is a resistance to Miller. When he turned 80, the BBC honoured Alan Bennett with a retrospective season. Will the BBC also honour Miller at 80? Perhaps not. Bennett, of course, is a national treasure. Is Miller? Despite the knighthood, it seems not. Too clever in some way? Too much of an outsider, perhaps? Too Jewish? Both Miller's grandfathers came from Lithuania. A long way from Alan Bennett's mam and dad in Leeds. Then there's Miller the young satirist, poking fun at British myths about the war. All those angry break-ups with institutions, most famously with Peter Hall at the National Theatre. Then there was Miller the outspoken critic of Thatcherism, who in 1991 famously attacked "this mean, peevish little country" and often seemed more at home abroad, working in the opera houses of Europe or America.

This is only partially true. Miller is an outsider, but also an insider: educated at St Paul's and Cambridge, at home in Britain's cultural institutions — the Old Vic with Olivier, Hall's National Theatre, ENO, the Royal Opera House, the BBC and Glyndebourne. His work could hardly be more English. "Every part of my memory is saturated with English imagery," he once said. When he criticised Thatcher, it was not as an outsider, but as someone from another England, the intellectual Left of the NHS, the BBC and the universities. 

His long-time friend Alan Bennett hinted that his play, The Habit of Art, about Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden, is in some ways about himself and Miller. Auden/Miller, flamboyant, demanding attention, imposing his intelligence on the other, Bennett/Britten. Auden was an outsider, Britten, like Bennett, a gentler, quintessential Englishman.

The Habit of Art is partly about friendship and creativity, two different kinds of artistic temperament. But it is also about failure. Perhaps it picks up something about Miller's sense of his own failure. Think of that quotation about Jude. "On return trips to St John's [his old Cambridge college]," writes his biographer, "he has come close to tears, wandering through the quad as the bell summons the dons to dinner in hall."

But even at the greatest moments of what Miller might consider failure, moments when he couldn't fulfil his dreams of writing scholarly books about Sherrington or mesmerism, we should remember the achievements that all this reading and thinking enabled.  

It has been an astonishing career, remarkable for its breadth and its quality. It is hard to think of anything else like it. The range of achievements is breathtaking. Only now, as Miller approaches his 80th birthday, can we begin to take stock. If he is not a national treasure, that perhaps says something more about us than about Miller and his extraordinary creativity over almost 60 years.