Vaclav Havel Dies

Vaclav Havel has passed away at the age of 75. Here’s the BBC obituary.

Havel was a playwright and, at the start of his writing career, he was a very funny playwright. Plays like The Memorandum were aimed at the Communist bureaucracy but would transfer just as easily to the Office-like idiocies of Capitalist companies. Or The Garden Party, where a clerk tells his progress-obsessed boss that he’s just read Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, to which the enthusiastic boss replies “Soon we’ll be able to read at even greater depths!”