One of today's finest and most uncompromising journalists devastatingly exposes the reality behind the unprecedented freedoms we supposedly enjoy. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism, and the advent of the Internet, it has become the conventional wisdom that we are living in an age of unprecedented freedom. But, as Nick Cohen argues, this view is in fact dangerously naive. From the Great Firewall of China to super-injunctions that shield the misdeeds of the filthy rich from public scrutiny, the traditional opponents of freedom of speech are thriving, and in many respects finding
the world a more comfortable place than ever before. In Britain, they are shamefully abetted by libel laws that have made the country an international byword for the judicialsuppression of inconvenient truths. Here, one of the wittiest and most excoriating journalists at work today passionately and persuasively describes how those in the liberated West find themselves in a situation in which one can write a novel, criticize an alternative therapy, or "offend" a religion by drawing a cartoon, and risk ending up financially ruined, or even dead.
