CATEGORY: Magazine

The abuse of history

The abuse of history

he spring 2018 issue of Index on Censorship magazine explores how across the globe, governments and various groups are using their powers to change their narratives – and manipulate history. Lucy Worsley talks about the Tudor Court and Margaret MacMillan discusses how Germany rewrote its past in the interwar period. Louisa Lim says she wouldn’t be able to write her critically acclaimed book on the Tiananmen Square Massacre today. And Irene Caselli meets the duo behind a museum in Cuba seeking to readdress the country’s dissident past. Elsewhere in the magazine bestselling Palestinian author Abbad Yahya talks to Index about the threats against his life, Laura Silvia Battaglia examines how refugees in Italy are self-censoring themselves in order to fit into their new society and ahead of the release of her new book, award-winning author Christie Watson writes an exclusive short story for Index.

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Book fairs and freedom

Book fairs and freedom

After Gothenburg and Frankfurt book fairs faced tension over who was allowed to attend, we asked four leading thinkers, Peter Englund, Ola Larsmo, Jean-Paul Marthoz, Tobias Voss, to debate the issue

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A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.

A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.

The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.

The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.