My You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom is out this week. As the title says, it’s about freedom of speech, a subject that has come to mean more and more to me as I have watched religious zealots intimidate liberals into silence, and the libel laws and omerta of City hierarchies stop investigations into a catastrophic financial system when they might have made a difference.
Writing in this week’s magazine, Alain de Botton talks about how authors can loathe critics, a feeling prompted in his case by a savage attack from Terry Eagleton. He ought to be less concerned. Given the professor’s ability to combine support for religious reaction with the support for the worst elements of the authoritarian Marxist tradition, a bad notice from that quarter is not an unmitigated disaster.
I have some had some raves from
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