23 Jul 2020
At the start of the year Index publishes the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal before he becomes Minister of Education in the revolutionary government.
The winter issue of the magazine reports on a controversy in the USA in which the Public Broadcasting Service has heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and has gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version.
23 Jul 2020
US playwright Arthur Miller writes in Index: “The sin of power is to not only distort reality but to convince people that the false is true, and that what is happening is only an invention of enemies.”
23 Jul 2020
The unofficial and banned Polish journal Zapis, mouthpiece of the writers and intellectuals who paved the way for the liberalisation in Poland, is published by Index. A translation of the Czechoslovak Charter 77 manifesto drafted by Václav Havel and others is also published this year.
Tom Stoppard’s play, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, is first performed with the London Symphony Orchestra. It is set in a Soviet mental institution and is inspired by the personal account of former detainee Victor Fainberg and Clayton Yeo’s expose of the use of psychiatric abuse in the USSR, published in Index on Censorship in 1975. Stoppard becomes a member of the advisory board the following year and remains a patron of Index.
23 Jul 2020
Index publicises the case of the tortured Iranian poet, Reza Baraheni, whose testimony subsequently appears in the New York Times.
