You Cant Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

(Paperback)

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From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the advert of the Web, everywhere you turn you are told that we live in age of unparalleled freedom. This is dangerously nave. From the revolution in Iran that wasnt to the imposition of super-injunctions from the filthy rich, we still live in a world where you can write a book and end up dead.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism and the advent of the Internet, it has become the conventional wisdom that we are living in an age of unprecedented freedom.

But, as Nick Cohen argues, this view is in fact dangerously nave. From the Great Firewall of China to super-injunctions that shield the misdeeds of the filthy rich from public scrutiny, the traditional opponents of freedom of speech are thriving, and in many respects finding the world a more comfortable place than ever before. In Britain, they are shamefully abetted by libel laws that have made the country an international byword for the judicial suppression of inconvenient truths.

In You Can't Read This Book, one of the wittiest and most excoriating journalists at work today passionately and persuasively describes how we in the liberated West find ourselves in a situation in which you can write a novel, criticise an alternative therapy or offend a religion by drawing a cartoon, and risk ending up financially ruined, or even dead.

Reviews

Cohen is perhaps the most insightful, thought-provoking and entertaining political writer in Britain today, and comes from the honest tradition of English liberal thought that threads from John Milton to John Stuart Mill and George Orwell Telegraph, Ed West

Nick Cohens books are like the best Smiths songs; however depressing the content, the execution is so shimmering, so incandescent with indignation that the overall effect is transcendently uplifting Julie Burchill, Prospect

It is useful to have all this material in one place, particularly for the benefit of young people, who must be taught about previous disputes over free expression Hanif Kureishi, Independent

You can read this book, and you probably should Hugo Rifkind, The Spectator

Into the space vacated by the controversialist Christopher Hitchens we might recruit the sardonic, sceptical columnist Nick Cohen Iain Finlayson, The Times

Nick Cohens new book is a corrective to the tendency of internet utopians to think that the web has ushered in an age of transparency New Statesman

Writing with passion, wit and erudition, Cohen draws upon the spirit of Orwell and Milton in his call for a fightback against the onslaught on free speech Metro, 4 stars

You Cant Read This Book. You can, OF COURSE. And you should. Cohen is right about everything that matters. Standpoint, Anthony Julius

Author Bio

Nick Cohen is a journalist and commentator for the Observer and Evening Standard. He is also the author of Whats Left the most important and provocative commentaries on how the Left lost its way.