Censored

A prolific novelist and memoirist, Ethel Mannin cleverly smuggled lots of controversial ideas into this best-selling autobiography. Freud’s influence on Mannin is clear at various points in the book because she is deeply interested in childhood as a political and cultural idea. Her chapters on schooling are very focused on telling readers about the vulnerability of children to scolding, humiliatio...

Written by a woman (and her ghost writer) hiding in an Italian villa to escape the paparazzi, this is a short, sometimes shocking memoir.   This is a type of celebrity memoir, a text written by someone in the eye of a media storm. The relationship between homosexuality and heterosexuality creates a lot of anxiety for Roberta.  What really jars with me, a reader in 2023, is the biological...

Let Box-Car Bertha show you the American underworld, where the homeless and rootless struggle to survive. An uncensored story that, unsurprisingly, was censored.   In the publishing landscape of the mid 20th century, uncensored obviously means salaciousness but also a type of honesty that is tough and uncompromising. Bertha’s mother believes in ‘free love’ a phrase I thought originated in the...

One of many books about the First World War on the censor’s blacklist, this one claims to offer a new, fresh perspective about the British army. But how much truth can a memoir written by ‘anonymous’ tell? With Dr Andrew Frayn.   For a novel that's meant to be from a women's point of view, it's often very uncharitable about them. Andrew Frayn People are walked up to the door of the bedroom, t...

Written by an old man reflecting on his life in sex, this notorious memoir was banned almost everywhere. It’s nice to know I’m not the imagined reader of this book – wrong gender, wrong gonads Harris thinks pandering to girl readers stripped English literature of its earthy Shakespearean soul His curious yoking together of philosophy and porn isn’t always successful Fancy supporting the show? Do s...

What happens when an Irishman whose dramas offended audiences writes an autobiography? The state censors ban it.   One censor asked: are you going to allow the truth to be told about everything to everyone without qualification and at all times? On a practical level, reading O’Casey’s memoir like a censor is not easy. Obviously Catholic censors don’t approve of Protestants – they were all apo...

A deep dive into the wonderful world of classified advertisements. You could buy nearly anything through Exchange and Mart : dogs, chickens, clothing. But if you look very closely, you can see why the censors decided it was ‘habitually and frequently indecent’. Without the post, E&M would never have existed – it was a business built on stamps and letters To avoid being prosecuted for obscenity...

Isadora Duncan was an artist who lived (and died) in an extraordinary manner. Her autobiography tells how she conceived a radical dance manifesto while partying across Europe. This memoir sold extremely well in America, being reprinted 9 times in 10 months A lot of this book reads like a society gossip column. Duncan can’t help being political: everything she sees about her life and women’s lives...

Why did a children’s picture book provoke new form of censorship in Britain?   Danish attitudes to children produced books that upset other European cultures. Before Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin was published in 1983, a member of parliament called Geoffrey Dickens called bookshops to boycott it. In 1988, a co-operative in Cork city called the Quay Co-Cop ran a bookshop that stocked what t...

For the first time on the podcast, it’s a publication that’s still banned in Ireland! According to Register of Prohibited Publications, Health and Efficiency is ‘unwholesome literature’. Naturally, we want to know precisely how this magazine is corrupting and degrading its readers. With Prof Annebella Pollen. Here’s today's 'blacklist' Annebella Pollen, Nudism in a Cold Climate: the Visual Culture...

A train that could whisk its passengers across borders and into each other’s arms was definitely too dangerous for the censors. With Juliette Breton.   There's something quite erotic and tempting about travel, the possibility that you can go anywhere, but also you can meet anyone. Juliette Breton So many thriller/adventure/spy novels from the period use trains as a kind of way of getting into...

When Walter Macken dedicated his first novel to his Mammy, Agnes, he did not expect the censors to declare it ‘obscene’. How does a social-problem novel by a good Catholic offend the official arbiters of taste?   Illegitimacy and pre martial sex are central themes and key plot devices. It's not as full throated an exploration of the relationship between man and sheep as you might expect. Mack...

Hailed as ‘Dirty Book of the Month’ by Time in 1966, this novel was an instant bestseller. But not in Ireland, where it was illegal to sell it between 1967 and 1979. What does this classic of women’s fiction have to say about feminism, sex and medicine? With Dr Cara Rodway.   I think one of the reasons it was so successful is that it has a wonderful curtain twitching element: who are the real...

This is the first banned book I’ve read that features both a foot fetish and communism. Gibbons writes satire so entrancing it’s can be hard to spot the filth but if the censors could do it, so could we. Or maybe the bewitching Englishness of the novel was too dangerous? With Dr Laura Ludtke. The novel induced that certain sweet boredom you get from reading a slow book where you look up and realiz...

Hundreds of magazine titles were banned by the Irish censor. This true-crime periodical, full of murder and gangsterism, couldn’t avoid being banned for discussing crime. But advertising ‘daring’ and ‘frank’ books didn’t help either. The exuberant rampant Americanness of this magazine is what really struck me. The law also banned court reports on ‘any indecent matter the publication of which would...

When Maura Laverty gently pointed out that Irish villages simmered with perverted lust, her novel was immediately censored. Or maybe it was her pointed criticism of the state that offended the censors. If an author can please an Irish audience with a book called ‘darlin’ by the British, she must be doing something special. This is a chilling depiction of poverty and old age in the new County Homes...

The pro-censorship lobby produced a rich and often hilarious polemic. Dr Lloyd (Maedhbh) Houston joins me to talk effluent, tainted minds and ‘race suicide’. We also debate whether censorship was more of a moral panic than a conspiracy theory. Alongside the priests, there are a lot of politicians in these debates where they use rhetoric of censorship to express profound and disturbed Anglophobia....

The most memorable scandals in Irish life feature a fulminating bishop and this is no exception. This brief controversy is infamous but why do we find it so compelling? Dr Morgan Wait joins me to talk about television and titillation in 1960s Ireland.   Anything that doesn’t feature Gay Byrne is going to get considerably less attention. Morgan Wait   When people recognise themselves, or...

Theatre riots might capture the imagination but audiences, critics and authority figures shape theatre in other less dramatic ways. Guest Dr Barry Houlihan talks about his new book Theatre and archival memory: Irish drama and marginalised histories 1951-77 (2022) ·     Reading a banned book is a private thing while theatre-going is a public political act. ·  &nbs...

When tax payers pay for libraries, librarians have a duty to ‘the public’. Defining that public isn’t easy, especially when priests, pressure groups and politicians get involved.   ·     Being an arbiter of taste and decency was a tough job and nobody appreciated it. ·     The censorship mentality was still deeply embedded in a prudish and hyp...

Moving pictures (de filums) were heavily censored but the state didn’t officially scrutinise other visual art forms. Censure by covert means was the preferred method to control subversive art. Guest: Dr Róisín Kennedy author of Art and the nation state: the reception of modern art in Ireland (2021)   ·     Part of the emotional response comes from a sense that modern...

Everyone wanted a piece of Roger Casement but which piece? Carefully extracting his skeleton from heavy London mud in 1965 didn’t end the controversy over his life and lusts.   ·     The treatment of Casement’s dead body was exceptionally cruel, even by the standards of executed prisoners. ·     Why are all our significant national events in M...

The scandal over Roger Casement’s diaries is huge. People have spent millions of hours of obsessing over whether diaries allegedly found in his personal papers were forgeries or not. It’s past time I read the smut and examined the censure of the man and his writings. Truly, he was the hottest martyr of the 1916 Rising – you could argue he was the finest half who ever laid down his life for the cau...

Liam O’Flaherty was the angriest Irish author of his generation who raged against ‘soutaned witch-doctors’ (Catholic priests). He believed his outspokenness provoked social censure so severe that his work could not be found anywhere in Ireland. Guest: Teresa Dunne   He’s a great man for the description of breasts Teresa Dunne I can’t believe we’re discussing whether holy medals count as a sex...

Although The Bell published fiction and factual pieces on topics the censors hated, such as single motherhood or gay desire, it was never banned. Unfortunately, only a determined few read a magazine that was not on open sale in every newsagent. Guest: Phyllis Boumans Phyllis.boumans@kuleuven.be   ·     The Bell tried to challenge the Catholic monomania by giving space...