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I've had my disagreements with Johann Hari, but I've also had my agreements with him (on George Galloway and the rest of the gruesome galere of faux-cialists, Hari is extremely reliable). And his is the best cold water obituary on Harold Pinter I've yet read: The tragedy of Pinter's politics is that he took a desirable political value - hatred of war, or distrust for his own government - and absolutizes it. It is good to hate war, but to take this so far that you will not resist Hitler and Stalin is absurd. It is good to oppose the...

there was never a question in my mind that his Nobel Prize for Literature was deserved, although I cringed when he received it because I knew he would seize the opportunity to make ugly and propagandistic statements. Of course, I was right about that - you didn’t have to be Nostradamus. Pinter attacked the US government as if it were the modern avatar of the Third Reich. He used his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in the words of the Washington Post, to denounce the U.S. invasion of Iraq and to call British prime minister Tony Blair “a deluded idiot.” What...

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false." No, that wasn't Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, half-answering questions in Europe last week about the CIA's alleged prison camps in Poland and Romania and the "extraordinary rendition" of terrorist suspects to countries where they are likely to be tortured. It was actually Harold Pinter, explaining the difference between drama and politics in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature....

Monstrous inequality is precisely what inspired the Cuban revolution. The revolution set out to correct such grotesque polarisation and was determined to ensure that the Cuban people never have to endure such degradation again. It understood that recognition of and respect for human dignity were crucial obligations which devolved upon a civilised society. Its achievements are remarkable. It constructed a health ser- vice which can hardly be rivalled and established an extraordinary level of lit- eracy. All this the US found to be abom- inable Marxist-Leninist subversion and naturally set out to destroy it. It has failed. And it must...

The US claims to champion freedom. In fact, its long record of brutality has imperilled peace, says Harold Pinter. POLITICIANS are interested not in truth but in power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. The justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing...

The whole issue of Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize in 1932 has always pissed me off. It just rankles that he got away with it, so the least we can do is blacken the bastard's name posthumously for the sake of the millions of dead Ukrainians he lied about. Now that Harold Pinter has won a Nobel Prize for literature, I guess the tradition of lionising men of letters who are apologists for mass murdering leftists is still alive and well.

Who do you think chooses the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature? You might say: the Swedish Academy or, at least, a group of literary experts in Stockholm. Well, although you are technically right, the truth is that the winner for the past two years has been chosen by the man whose trial opened in Baghdad last Wednesday. Surprised? Don’t be. Saddam Hussein al-Takriti, the man who bullied and butchered the people of Iraq for three decades, is emerging as an undeclared hero of some self-styled liberals in the West who continue to oppose the liberation of Iraq because...

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - British playwright Harold Pinter, a master of sparse dialogue and menacing silences who has been an outspoken critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, was the surprise winner of the Nobel literature prize on Thursday. The 75-year-old Londoner, son of a Jewish dressmaker, is one of Britain's best-known dramatists for plays like "The Birthday Party" and "The Caretaker," whose mundane dialogue with sinister undercurrents gave rise to the adjective "Pinteresque." An intimidating presence with bushy eyebrows and a rich voice, he was described by Swedish Academy head Horace Engdahl, who announced the prize, as "the towering figure"...