In this issue, former editor of the London Observer finds freedom of the British press in jeopardy.
How the British press censors itself
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Confused Mhlaba: a banned South African play
In this issue, Index publishes three scenes from the play banned by South African censors.
Czechoslovakia 8 years after
In this issue, Index publishes four case histories on Czechoslovakia.
Sakharov: Nobel Prize speech
In this issue, Index publishes the text of Andrei Sakharov’s 1975 Nobel Lecture.
The freedom of the press
In this issue, a distinguished historian looks at the action taken by governments to suppress ‘dangerous’ literature from 1486 for the present day.
Soviet “unofficial” art
In this issue, the organiser of the ‘bulldozed’ art exhibition in Moscow tells the story of modern Soviet artists who do not conform to socialist realism.
Lisbon – What next?
In this issue, Index publishes an interview with the Editor of Expresso, one of the few independent papers left in Portugal.
South Africa cultural boycott—yes or no?
Late last year Index on Censorship circulated to six hundred artists and intellectuals around the world a questionnaire about the cultural boycott of South Africa. The survey was announced in our first issue of 1975. At that time a few early...
Should writers boycott South Africa?
In this issue, Index publishes a summary of replies to the questionnaire.
The human rights movement in USSR
In this issue, Index publishes the text of Pavel Litvinov’s lecture at the Royal Institute of International Affairs during his London visit.
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.