[3][4] The 46-minute videotaped lecture was projected on three large screens in front of the audience at the Swedish Academy, in Stockholm, on the evening of 7 December 2005.

[5][6] Soon after its videotaped delivery and simulcast, the full text and streaming video formats were posted for the public on the Nobel Prize and Swedish Academy official websites.

DVD and VHS video recordings of Pinter's Nobel Lecture (without Hare's introduction) are produced and distributed by Illuminations.

This video recording of the lecture was introduced by Pinter's close friend, the writer Salman Rushdie, originator and chairman of PEN World Voices, and shown publicly in the United States for the first time at the Harold Pinter Memorial Celebration: A Tribute to Harold Pinter, at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, of The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, on 2 May 2009, as part of the 5th annual PEN World Voices Festival.

[7] He describes his own artistic process of creating The Homecoming and Old Times, following an initial line or word or image, calling "the author's position" an "odd one" as, experiencing the "strange moment … of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence," he must "play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek" during which "the search for the truth … has to be faced, right there, on the spot."

Distinguishing among his plays The Birthday Party, Mountain Language, and Ashes to Ashes, he segues into his transitions from "the search for truth" in art and "the entirely different set of problems" facing the artist in "Political theatre" to the avoidance of seeking "truth" in "power politics" (5–9).

As every single person here knows, 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 about appalling devastation.

We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al-Qaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11, 2001.

Revisiting arguments from his political essays and speeches of the past decade, Pinter reiterates:It never happened.

It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road.

(16)Toward the end of the lecture, after reading two poems referring to "blood in the streets", "deaths", "dead bodies", and "death" by fellow Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda ("I'm Explaining a Few Things") and himself ("Death"), in a whimsically humble gesture, Pinter offers to "volunteer" for the "job" of "speech writer" for President George W. Bush, penning a ruthless message of fierce aggression masquerading as moral struggle of good versus evil yet finally proffering the "authority" of his (Bush's) "fist" (17–22).

Pinter concludes his Nobel Lecture with a call for "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies" as "a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all," one which he regards as "in fact mandatory," for, he warns, "If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man" (23–24).

Few writers in our time have demonstrated such a passionate concern for victims of oppression, whether in the family's living room or in the torturer's faraway bunker, as Harold Pinter.

In response to his videotaped Nobel Lecture broadcast on More 4 and distributed via the internet, heated critical debate about Pinter spiked in the public media and spread throughout the blogosphere.

Such criticism of Pinter encompassed thousands of commentaries and focused mostly on his political activism, particularly his purported "anti-Americanism" and his generally "leftist" views.

He observes, "The most startling fact was that Pinter's Nobel Lecture on 7 December was totally ignored by the BBC", adding: "You would have thought that a living British dramatist's views on his art and global politics might have been of passing interest to a public service broadcaster"; yet "There was ... no reference to the speech on any of BBC TV's news bulletins that night or indeed on its current affairs programme, Newsnight" (Harold Pinter 424).

While "in the press, there was also a handful of attacks on both the award and the Lecture," Billington dispatches criticisms by three of them: "the normally sensible Johan Hari", who "dismissed the Lecture in advance [of its broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK] as a 'rant' and falsely claimed that Pinter would have refused to resist Hitler"; "in fact," Billington says, Pinter "has repeatedly said that, had he been of age, he would have accepted conscription in World War II" (424–25).

"More predictably, Christopher Hitchens was wheeled out to dismiss Pinter as 'a bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long' ", and, finally, Billington cites Scottish historian Niall Ferguson's "attack" on the Lecture in The Daily Telegraph, quoting in part Ferguson's statement that in his Nobel Lecture Pinter " 'pretend[s] that [US] crimes were equivalent to those of its Communist opponents ...' "––a distortion according to both Billington and Pinter: "he never made any comparison in his speech between atrocities committed by the Soviet Union and China and those of America"; " 'All I ever said,' [Pinter] retorts, 'is that Soviet atrocities were comprehensively documented but that American actions weren't.

Billington also points out that the Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library contains "two large boxes containing the thousands of letters Pinter received from friends, colleagues, public eminences and total strangers applauding both the prize and his political stance" (425).

"[16] Also to critical acclaim, it premiered in New South Wales, Australia, beginning on 8 January 2009, two weeks after Pinter's death,[17][18] and there are plans to bring the troupe over to perform Being Harold Pinter in New York City, as part of the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, according to its director Mark Russell.

["In his video-taped Nobel acceptance speech, Harold Pinter excoriated a 'brutal, scornful and ruthless' United States.

This is the full text of his address"; features links relating to Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

[Inc. "Art, Truth & Politics: The 2005 Nobel Lecture"; 8 plays and the dramatic sketch "Press Conference"; and 10 poems.]

"Harold Pinter: Theater's Angry Old Man: At the Prize of Europe, the Playwright Is All Politics."

"The Importance of Being Pinter: A New Production by the Belarus Free Theatre Reinforces the Global Resonance of the British Playwright's Political Works."

"Passionate Pinter's Devastating Assault On US Foreign Policy: Shades of Beckett As Ailing Playwright Delivers Powerful Nobel Lecture."

Features photographs reposted from Mark Taylor-Batty's University of Leeds Website for the conference Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter.]

"Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to Harold Pinter, British Playwright Widely Studied in Academe".

[Correction appended 10 December 2005: "An article on Thursday about the playwright Harold Pinter's criticism of American foreign policy in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for literature described it incompletely.

"Harold Pinter Bibliography: 2002–2004 With a Special Supplement on the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, October 2005 – May 2006."