Nick Cohen

As he tours the follies of the Left, Nick Cohen asks us to consider what it means to be liberal in this confused and topsy-turvy time.

How Liberals Lost Their Way

What's Left?

The Internet was meant to bring a golden age of free communication. Dictatorships would topple and knowledge flourish as the new technology released the captive minds of humanity.From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the advert of the Web, everywhere you turn you are told that we live in age of unparalleled freedom. This is dangerously naive. Nick Cohen looks at how the brave hopes have been dashed in Iran, Burma, China and closer to home in the West. He examines how London has become a centre for libel tourism open to every rich criminal in the world and how corporations can wreck the economy because their employees cannot speak out.

Censorship in an Age of Freedom

You Can't Read this Book

While the rest of the media lounge in the warm glow of New Labour's rosy dawn, one journalist in Britain has been a consistently sharp and witty scourge of Tony Blair and his bandwagon babes. Step forward Nick Cohen, denizen of the Observer newspaper's celebrated 'Hold on a Minute' column and a writer who has regularly identified Labour's Third Way as the mid-point between truth and lies, decency and hypocrisy, honesty and corruption. Whether he is tearing into Labour's plans to privatize the prison system and introduce curfews for teenagers, or detailing the government's cozying up to Rupert Murdoch and the hot money traders in the City, Cohen maintains a peerless grasp on the power that flows from fusing invective with scrupulous investigation. Even Downing Street Policy Advisor Andrew Adonis was forced to concede that 'no one is better at getting under the Government's skin'. A coruscating barrage of dispatches from his sniper's post, Cruel Britannia celebrates Cohen's lonely stand. It will revivify the disillusioned who anticipated something better from Labour's ascent and fortify those on the left who expected little and received precisely that.

Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous

Cruel Britannia

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the advert of the Web, everywhere you turn you are told that we live in age of unparalleled freedom. This is dangerously naïve. From the revolution in Iran that wasn't to the imposition of super-injunctions from the filthy rich, we still live in a world where you can write a book and end up dead. 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 naïve. 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 judicial suppression of inconvenient truths. In You Can't Read This Book, one of the wittiest and most excoriating journalists at work today passionately and persuasively describes how we in the liberated West find ourselves in a situation in which you can write a novel, criticise an alternative therapy or "offend" a religion by drawing a cartoon, and risk ending up financially ruined, or even dead.

You Can't Read This Book

Ayana Dootalieva

European integration is an ambitious goal that attempts to reconcile grandiose visions for the future of Europe with complicated national attitudes toward unity. The added complexity of political crises, which have characterized the European project from its outset, makes the success of the European Union far from guaranteed. Today, European unity is once again at an existential crossroad, with internal and external challenges threatening its integration. This volume uniquely brings together the novel perspectives of Europe’s emergent generation of thinkers to analyze through interdisciplinary lenses these various disintegrative pressures. Students and scholars of Europe as well as those interested in the future of European cohesion will enjoy this volume, both for the interdisciplinary analysis it brings forth and for the window it provides into the thinking of Europe’s next generation of leaders.

Essays from the Next Generation of Europe's Thinkers

European Integration and Disintegration

The uncompromising Nick Cohen exposes the reality behind the freedoms we enjoy in the book that won Polemic of the Year at the 2013 Political Book Awards.

Nick Cohen

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