Author Description

How does censorship affect our basic right to freedom? Donald Thomas gives a disturbing insight into what those in power consider too dangerous to be seen, or said, by ordinary people. This book reveals how censorship has restricted freedom of expression in the past, including obscenity prosecutions of major and minor writers in the first half of the twentieth century, and continues to silence us in the present with the more insidious tool of political correctness. From the use of seditious libel proceedings to stop rumours of George V's bigamy to the Mutiny Act used to silence Communist publications in the 1920s; from the use of the Official Secrets Act to ban the publication of Spycatcher, to the Salman Rushdie controversy in 1989, Donald Thomas chronicles a broad range of censorship cases. Freedom's Frontier argues that although we have won greater freedom of expression in some areas, we have lost the absolute liberty of political expression that was present in the Victorian era. This is a timely and thought-provoking book that challenges the boundaries of censorship and questions the definitions of freedom in today's society.