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Pinter quoted Pablo Neruda's poem, I'm Explaining a Few Things: "and from every dead child a rifle with eyes and from every crime bullets are born/which will one day find/the bull's eye of your hearts."

He had chosen this poem "because nowhere in contemporary poetry had he read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians". His lecture called on all of us "as citizens" to define the real truth of our lives and our societies".

Pinter asked: "What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?"

Pinter described a writer's life as "a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity... You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case, of course, you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician."

This year's Nobel literature laureate, best known for his work as a dramaturge, talked about The Homecoming and Old Times and about the process of writing for theatre.

"Truth in drama is forever elusive." There is never one truth to be found in dramatic art, said Pinter, but many. "These truths challenge each other. These truths slip through one's fingers. And so language in art becomes ambiguous."

In theatre, sermonising has to be avoided and objectivity is essential. However, political satire does precisely the opposite of this. Political language, says Pinter, does not venture into this territory "because politicians, in the main, are interested not in truth but in power".

The lecture, which travelled across the world media, reiterated what Pinter had said in 1958: "A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false".

Pinter's Nobel speech can be accessed on nobel.org.

Sheer bad luck is how Heyns views this. Two of the novels are concerned with James's failure to make it as a dramaturge; Heyns focuses on James's later years. Surely these novels do not detract from Heyns's achievement, which is based on a lifelong interest in James.

The reinvention of an early American modernist in a novel based on fact is a first for South African literature. Heyns wrote his PhD thesis at Stellenbosch University on the use of irony in James's late novels.

His dissertation for Cambridge University was on James's short stories. In The Typewriter's Tale, an affair between two of James's friends, Morton Fullerton and Edith Wharton, who was married at the time, makes for delicious intrigue. Details will be in a review of the book, to be published on this page shortly.

"The Woman who Loved an Alien" provides background to Elizabeth Klarer's unusual marital adventures. Klarer, who married Akon, a scientist from the planet Meton in the Alpha Centauri system, and who fathered her child, completed a four-year diploma in meteorology at Cambridge.

She later married Captain W Stafford Philips, a Royal Air Force pilot who was also a keen spiritualist and student of unexplained phenomena.

Her second husband, Paul Klarer, an engineer, was too level-headed to handle her convictions. Also profiled in Maverick is The Magnificent Ma Brr, Brenda Fassie, who started singing almost as soon as she could speak.

Claxton, in her introduction, calls the text a sampler of some of the great personal literature. It includes a vast range. Marcus Aurelius Antonius tells us dauntingly that from his mother he learnt "piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds but even from evil thoughts".

David Eggers, in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: A memoir based on a true story (2000), offers a defence of the genre, saying we could do worse as writers and as readers.