After 30 years, a magazine like Index should be redundant. It’s a disgrace that we haven’t closed it down and that you still feel the need to read it.
Filling the silence: 30 years of Index
read more
CATEGORY: Magazine
Squeeze on democracy: Crisis, terror and the media
Index explores the crisis of democracy posed by the joint forces of terrorism and globalisation.
The silence of madness
In this issue, Index on Censorship examines the issues around mental health and free expression.
Race matters
In this issue, Index asks why intolerance is rising and what it is we have to fear?
Identikit Europe: The politics of identity
In this issue, Index explores what we mean when we talk of a “European identity”. Is the EU simply a white man’s club? Or is there more to it than that? Who is Europe?
Memory and forgetting
Index looks at the orgy of “revisionism” with which the new century has opened and at the competing versions of “history” seeking recognition as the “official” version.
Last laugh
In this issue, Index on Censorship magazine explores laughter and censorship. Satire and offense. Censors have no sense of humour.
Manufacturing monsters
In this issue, Index on Censorship looks at the media manipulation that allows for the creation and punishment of monsters at home and abroad.
This sporting li(f)e
Index examines the tarnished world of sport. Has commercialism destroyed sportsmanship? What is the significance of race in sport?
The privacy issue: Privacy on parade
In this issue, Index looks at who the enemies of privacy are and how, in a wired future, any of us have a private life.
Women who censor
Index untangles the disagreements and cultural differences over sex and violence, the right to abortion, wearing the veil, and confronts the women who believe in censorship as a means of protecting themselves, their daughters and their culture.
The new slavery
In this issue, Index on Censorship magazine explores the evolving nature of slavery – a virus that won’t go away.
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.
