Censorship

The making of a poet: Wilfred Owen’s ‘autobiography’ in letters

5 August 2023 9:00 am

How, between 1911 and 1917, Owen became the dazzling poet we know and love is the story told in Jane Potter’s new edition of his selected letters

The rewriting of Roald Dahl is an act of cultural vandalism

19 February 2023 9:57 pm

The vandals have come for Roald Dahl. His books for children are to be cleansed of their ‘offensive’ content. Sensitivity…

Is Russell Brand really so dangerous?

8 October 2022 9:00 am

Once the dust has settled over the government’s mini-Budget, another big political battle looms: the Online Safety Bill. This is…

Guston is treated with contempt: Philip Guston Now reviewed

20 August 2022 9:00 am

Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he…

The closing of the Chinese mind

4 June 2022 9:00 am

I was born in Nanjing five years after the Tiananmen Square protests. By then, records of the demonstrations and the…

Fascinating exhibitions – clunky editorialising: Breaking the News at the British Library reviewed

7 May 2022 9:00 am

In The Spectator office’s toilets there are framed front covers of the events that didn’t happen: Corbyn beats Boris; ‘Here’s…

Are cancel-culture activists aware of their sinister bedfellows?

2 April 2022 9:00 am

Is there a woke case to be made for freedom of expression? Jacob Mchangama certainly seems to think so. This…

Boris is about to give Silicon Valley censors more power than ever

19 February 2022 4:54 am

Four years in the making, the Online Safety Bill has now been sent to senior ministers for review — a…

Kate Clanchy and the new censorship in publishing

12 August 2021 1:00 am

‘There’s more than one way to burn a book’, wrote Ray Bradbury, in a coda to the 1979 edition of…

Salman Rushdie’s self-importance is entirely forgivable

10 July 2021 9:00 am

I have the habit, when reading a collection of essays, of not reading them in order. I’m pretty sure I’m…

My fight to stop the Chinese censors sanitising Dante

13 March 2021 9:00 am

How Dante fell foul of the Chinese Communist party

jack dorsey

@jack is the giant

13 January 2021 3:09 am

Where is Jack? You know, Jack-the-Giant-Killer? The little fellow who caught the giant Cormaran in a deadfall and dispatched him…

parler tech

The Big Tech backfire

12 January 2021 7:43 am

If your aim is to stop America descending into civil conflict, it’s hard to think of a less effective method…

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Trump’s social media ban sets a dangerous precedent

10 January 2021 4:11 am

Facebook and Twitter’s decision to suspend Donald Trump is, legally speaking, fairly clear-cut. Both are private companies which set the…

Why AI will never write a great song

19 December 2020 9:00 am

Two years ago, the songwriter Nick Cave told his fans that he’d speak to them directly — not through an…

chinese twitter china

Twitter is in China’s pocket

3 December 2020 6:01 am

Twitter has been quick on the draw when responding to tweets by President Trump in the last month, as he…

Was what I said on Facebook really 'hate speech'?

22 November 2020 6:00 pm

Facebook has been accused of failing to combat extremism and hate-speech among its users. But as I found out this week,…

new york post big tech

Unanswered questions for Big Tech

22 October 2020 8:27 am

It’s been a full week since the New York Post published their first story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is…

trump

President Trump should bend — but not break — Big Tech

6 August 2020 1:47 am

Americans’ increasing focus on this fall’s elections has awakened in me a tinge of nostalgia for the good old days…

facebook

Facebook is right. Twitter is wrong

29 May 2020 7:46 am

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey opened up a Pandora’s box two days ago by dropping a fact-check on a tweet by…

How to fight back against ‘cancel culture’

25 January 2020 6:30 pm

‘Cancel culture’ is a horrible term because outside of a dictatorship nobody can actually be ‘canceled’ or otherwise ‘disappeared’. All…

donald trump silicon valley

Is war with Silicon Valley a Trump 2020 strategy?

5 May 2019 12:49 am

The world, or at least Twitter, awoke Saturday morning to an extraordinary series of retweets from the site’s most infamous…

Why are men being such wusses over #MeToo?

29 September 2018 9:00 am

‘There are two sides to every story’ is an aphorism you don’t hear often lately. Ask anyone amidst a family…

A joke about Welsh vowels is a hate crime, say the tuppenny panjandrums

21 April 2018 9:00 am

It took four days to actually see the pine marten in the flesh. We caught it on a trail cam…

Master of the dark art of interrogation: Alexander Scotland in 1945

A grand inquisitor

2 September 2017 9:00 am

Hidden behind Kensington Palace, in one of London’s smartest streets, there is a grand old house which played a leading…