Our editor-at-large opens up about his personal, complicated relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
Solidarity, Assange-style
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CATEGORY: Magazine
The SLAPP stickers
A conversation between a wokey comedian, Rosie Holt, and her wonky lawyer brother, Charlie Holt, co-chair of the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition, on how open secrets survive on the comedy circuit
Joke’s on Lukashenka speaking rubbish Belarusian. Or is it?
Belarus’ belligerent leader is both tyrannical and comical. It’s fodder for the nation’s comics – when they’re not being muzzled
Fined thousands for a joke
Malaysian Comedian Rizal Van Geysel tells Francis Clarke how jokes landed him with a court case which inspired his recent show
Contents – Having the last laugh: The comedians who won’t be silenced
Contents
Having the last laugh: The comedians who won’t be silenced
Volume 52.04 Winter 2023
In bad faith: How religion is being weaponised by the right
Volume 52.03 Autumn 2023
Contents – In bad faith: How religion is being weaponised by the right
Contents
The Embassy Murders: A new short story
Marking 50 years since Pinochet’s coup and 33 years on from our introduction to political prisoner Paulina Salas in Death and the Maiden, she returns in this new work
Contents – Express yourself: Overcoming neurodiversity stereotypes
Contents
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.