Premiering in 2006, The Vertical Hour marks David Hare's direct engagement with the political and moral aftershocks of the Iraq War.

The play follows Nadia Blye, an American academic whose support for military intervention is challenged during a weekend in rural England, where personal relationships gradually become inseparable from questions of ethics, responsibility and power. Hare's gift is to show how geopolitical convictions are never entirely abstract: they emerge from biographies, desires, loyalties and private failures.

Like much of Hare's work, the dialogue is lean, intellectually agile and emotionally restrained. Ideas are never reduced to mouthpieces, and the play avoids easy ideological victories, instead allowing conflicting worldviews to coexist in uncomfortable tension. Read today, The Vertical Hour remains an incisive portrait of liberal interventionism, transatlantic politics and the limits of moral certainty in the twenty-first century.

First American edition (Faber and Faber, 2006). Very good paperback with light shelf wear and clean, tightly bound pages throughout.