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Banned Books
If you’re not aware already, this week is the American Library Association’s Banned Book Week, which seeks to draw attention to the freedom to read and “reminds Americans not to take this precious...
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Fanny, or, More problems with the naughty filter
After our recent troubles with Facebook, our attempt to sign up with Google Books faces this unexpected hurdle: In a previous editing life, I was once involved in a very, very long discussion with an...
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Girls Aloud and the Obscene Publications Act
Not words you really expect to find in the same sentence. Girls Aloud, Britain’s best girl-pop combo in absolutely yonks, are definitely flirty and really a little bit dirty, but obscene? No. But they...
View ArticleBoycott Dubai: Literature, Censorship and Homophobia in the Gulf
Several news outlets this morning carry the story of British author Geraldine Bedell being banned from the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature in Dubai because of the depiction of a...
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On Amazonfail: Another case study for the pile
Over the last weekend, a controversy has blown up around the online retailer Amazon’s apparent “restriction” of large numbers of books across its international sites, heavily weighted towards adult...
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Dirty Mondays: “The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name” by James Kirkup
For Easter Monday, possibly the most controversial poem of recent decades: James Kirkup’s “The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name”. When it was first published in Gay News in 1976, it caused a furore...
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It’s Still On: The real failure of Amazonfail, Dubai, and Internet Outrage
There’s a lot of post-Amazonfail discussion on the blogs at the moment. We wrote up our own experiences here, but we’d like to do a bit of a debrief on this, and the recent Dubai Literature Festival...
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Some kind of Justice: Girls Aloud torture porn Redux
Publishers and internet users can breathe a sigh of relief today, as Newcastle Crown Court formally returned a not guilty verdict to the charges we first discussed back in December. Darryn Walker, a...
View ArticleQuantum Obscenity, and the networking of desire
A good, if a little vague, article by Maureen Freely in Saturday’s Guardian brings together two recent news stories in an examination of our changing attitudes to children, art and sexual offences: the...
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A Happy Finish: James Gillray and the Victorian Obscenity Laws
If you wanted to get your hands on the really dirty stuff in the 19th century, you had to get it under the counter. But, you could usually get it from the same people you got your finer works from:...
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