Issue No.
61
October 2012
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| Welcome to October’s review of books |
 Tim Black
We are too accustomed in the UK to the sight of people being arrested for things they've said. It could be a racist rant, an anti-gay tirade or merely a daft joke. Whatever the words in question, when it comes to free speech, some people are clearly less free than others. As his new book The Harm in Hate Speech shows, US law professor Jeremy Waldron clearly thinks that Americans could do with a bit of hate speech legislation, too. But, as Josie Appleton argues in this month's spiked review of books, prohibiting hate speech not only criminalises people who haven't actually done anything, it further infantilises public discourse. Elsewhere, we have Neil Davenport on an unpatriotic history of the Second World War, Emmet Livingstone on the historical audacity of Hilary Mantel, Jason Walsh on Ireland's anarchist professor, and much, much more. [Cover illustration by Jan Bowman.] |
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