A cacophony of opinion broke out across the weekend’s literary pages, all of it eloquent and entertaining.
On Thursday, Nick Cohen will publish his anticipated account of England’s pernicious libel law, You Can’t Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Cohen condemns the legal establishment that values deference to the mighty above freedom of speech. Yesterday’s Observer carried an extract from the book. The excerpt merits reading in full, but here is a typical paragraph to warm you on this bitter morning:
‘With an aristocratic prejudice against freedom of speech, the judges imposed costs and sanctions on investigative journalism that would have been hard to endure in the best of times, but were unbearable after the internet had undermined the media’s business models. Instead of aiming its guns at the worst of British writing, the law of libel aimed at the bravest.
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