19th October 2012

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the advent of the Web, everywhere you turn you are told that we live in age of unparalleled freedom. In You Can’t Read This Book Nick Cohen argues that this view is dangerously naïve. This is not an account of interesting but trivial disputes about freedom of speech: the rights and wrongs of shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, of playing heavy metal at 3am in a built-up area or articulating extremist ideas in a school or university. Rather, this is a story that starts with the cataclysmic reaction of the Left and Right to the publication and denunciation of the Satanic Verses in 1988 that saw them jump into bed with radical extremists. It ends at the juncture where even in the transgressive, liberated West, where so much blood had been spilt for Freedom, where rebellion is the conformist style and playing the dissenter the smart career move in the arts and media, you can write a book and end up destroyed or dead.

—

Nick Cohen is a British journalist, author, and political commentator. His most recent book—You Can’t Read This Book, published in 2012—examines new forms of censorship emerging in the 21st century. Cohen is currently a columnist for The Observer, a blogger for The Spectator, and a TV critic for Standpoint magazine. Cohen has written several books, including Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous, a collection of his journalism.