The American Spectator

br> We blew the s—t out of them, br> They suffocated in their own s—t! br> Hallelullah. br> Praise the Lord for all good things. br> We blew them into f—-ing s—t. br> They are eating it. br> Praise the Lord for all good things. br> We blew their balls into shards of dust, br> Into shards of f—-ing dust. br> We did it. br> Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth. /blockquote>

Okay, it doesn’t rhyme, but it is not without (flawed) reason. You can see what he is driving at, you get his drift. America goes to war, he is saying, with murder in its bowels, gum in its brain, and a copy of Hustler in its back pocket.

Pinter would of course hotly and loudly deny that he had any affinity with the far right — he might indeed create a scene if any such thing were suggested — but he voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979, in protest against the strikes that had shut down the National Theater for weeks on end. He must therefore take his share of the blame for the Thatcher Terror. “I look back on that vote with disbelief,” he now says. “I in fact realized within weeks that it was a stupid, totally irresponsible and shameful act.”

He was having an affair with the gifted historian Lady Antonia Fraser at the time of this shameful act. In 1975 he left Vivien Merchant, whom he had married in 1956, and in 1980 married Antonia. Vivien went into an alcoholic decline, and died two years later, aged 53. These things happen. The press salivated. Antonia was a Catholic, the daughter of Lord Longford, the Labour politician and sometime friend of Evelyn Waugh (and irrepressible romantic: in the 1970’s he earned the nickname “Lord Porn” for his crusade against pornography, in the course of which he sat solemnly in sex clubs and watched acts of unspeakable depravity). Before her divorce Antonia was married to the respected Tory MP Hugh Fraser, and they had six children. Perhaps there was an element of snobbery as well as salaciousness in the newspapers’ interest. Looked at from an American perspective, it was as though Pat Buckley had left William and run off with Philip Roth.