Prospect online this week: Armando Iannucci in profile

With his first feature film, In The Loop, due to hit British cinemas this coming Friday, Armando Iannucci is arguably this country's most prominent political satirist; and, after a rapturous critical reception for the film at the Sundance festival, you might expect him to be pretty pleased with himself. When author and critic Hans Kundnani caught up with Iannucci to watch In The Loop and profile its author for this week's Prospect web exclusive, however, he found someone both angrier and more elusive than this; a man caught between his duty to the kind of pure, painfully funny comedy he helped create in shows like The Day Today and I'm Alan Partridge, and his urge to speak truth to power by creating an exaggerated but accurate parallel political world. For a man whose great horror of Tony Blair was that he was "an actor," fiction, it seems, has proved an especially slippery mode of attack; and his vision of a world in which a middle-eastern country is invaded by a US-led force on the basis of dubious intelligence treads a fine line between fact and fable. As ever, let us know your own thoughts below.