Is Free Speech Under Threat?
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  • Published: 10 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781847928221
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Is Free Speech Under Threat?

Formats & editions
Paperback
20 Jan 2026
EBook
3 Oct 2024
Audiobook
10 Oct 2024
Hardback
10 Nov 2024
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Two concise, authoritative, opposing views on the question at the heart of the culture wars

Two leading thinkers present alternative answers to one of the most difficult and divisive questions of our times: Is free speech under threat?

Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, the leading free expression organisation, argues that alongside the necessary and long-overdue elevation of minority voices in recent years, there has also arisen an uncompromising intolerance – most notably on university campuses and online – that wrongly equates a wide range of offensive speech with violence and seeks to shut it down. This has led to an escalating free speech arms race, from which everyone loses.

Charlotte Lydia Riley, historian of empire and editor of The Free Speech Wars, argues that accusations of cancel culture and defences of free speech are too often disingenuous attempts to fuel a culture war and so inhibit an important realignment in which hateful speech is at last being called out for what it is and the right to free expression is being extended to more people than ever before.

Published in conjunction with Intelligence Squared, the world’s leading curator of debate, this book is part of the THINK AGAIN series: short books that present two expert, contrasting but equally persuasive views in a single volume that can be read from either end.
  • Published: 10 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781847928221
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the authors

Charlotte Lydia Riley

Charlotte Lydia Riley is a lecturer in twentieth-century British history at the University of Southampton, whose writing has appeared in New Statesman, Prospect, Dazed, New Humanist, Popula, Progressive Review, History Today and the BBC World Histories magazine. She co-hosts a podcast, Tomorrow Never Knows, in which she and Emma Lundin discuss feminism, pop culture, politics and history. Her Twitter feed @lottelydia has almost 35,000 followers, and she writes a regular column in Tribune about modern history, British identity and the left. She has a doctorate from UCL and taught previously at LSE and the University of York.

Praise for Is Free Speech Under Threat?

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Praise for DARE TO SPEAK: DEFENDING FREE SPEECH FOR ALL by Suzanne Nossel

As a prominent defender of outspoken wordsmiths, Suzanne Nossel knows a thing or two about free speech, and she makes a powerful case that freedom of expression is not just compatible but necessary for the advancement of equality and human rights

Steven Pinker

This brave, wise, succinct book is a must-read for writers, speakers, teachers, journalists, and, well, anyone who talks

Margaret Atwood

A much needed, cogent and compelling blueprint

Hillary Rodham Clinton

An authoritative, essential book

Salman Rushdie

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Praise for IMPERIAL ISLAND: A HISTORY OF EMPIRE IN MODERN BRITAIN by Charlotte Lydia Riley

A masterful, ingeniously written telling of Britain's real history ... Read this incisive and forensic book, and you won't look at Britain in the same way ever again

Owen Jones

A withering indictment of cruel Britannia … a chilling history of institutional and public prejudice … Riley gives injustices that ought to be better known their due

Guardian

A marvellous account of how the empire made modern Britain. With an eye that ranges from popular culture to the highbrow, from high politics to the household, Charlotte Riley's book is a thought-provoking delight that absolutely everyone should read

Stephen Bush

Skilfully, inexorably and powerfully, she builds up a picture that's been hiding in plain sight for far too long

Lucy Worsley
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