Censorship
Sir: By printing a letter (18 November) calling my friend Hans Keller a twat you would probably have been found guilty of obscenity until 1960, when the acquittal of Lady Chatterley's Lover allowed you to print it, and other four-letter words for the female genital organs, without much fear of prosecution. When I was young, in the 1930s, a poet was jailed for six months for merely showing verses containing such words to a printer. Art exhibitions were closed by the police and pictures seized simply for showing bare nipples; the depiction of pubic hair was enough to land a painter in prison. A friend who took some photographs to a chemist for developing had them confiscated because they showed a nude female; the female in question was his three-year-old daughter splashing about under the shower from a hose in his garden.
The only countries where such rigid censorship still exists are Russia — where a magazine showing a bare breast will be seized by the Customs as pornographic — and similar authoritarian regimes, of the left and the right. Authoritarians, whether their names are Brezhnev or Whitehouse, hate all free expression, whether on political, moral or sexual matters.
Those who have joined the Defence of Literature & the Arts Society to resist those trying to make it a crime again to acknowledge the existence of nipples, pubic hair and certain common words, or to photograph one's naked small daughter in the garden (now called 'child porn') will deplore Patrick Marnham's snide piece about the Society in your issue of 18 November. To call one or two would-be censors 'the latest medical opinion' while ignoring highly qualified people who take the opposite view is to stoop to the Whitehouse method of calling her supporters experts, but her opponents, however eminent, 'experts', in insulting quoted.
Alec Bristow The Grange, Thwalte, Eye, Suffolk
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