Thousands have run afoul of Britain's Obscene Publications Act--from Victorian erotica presses to 21st-century dominatrices. At a time when the internet has made sexually explicit material ubiquitous, why are British traditional media still regulated by a vaguely worded law from 1857? This comprehensive analysis of obscenity in British culture explores what is considered obscene, who gets to decide, and how class, race and gender inform laws regarding adult content. The author describes how obscenity laws disproportionately affect the BDSM subculture, the LGBT community and feminist porn performers.

A comprehensive history of censorship in modern Britain For Victorian lawmakers and judges, the question of whether a book should be allowed to circulate freely depended on whether it was sold to readers whose mental and moral capacities were in doubt, by which they meant the increasingly literate and enfranchised working classes. The law stayed this way even as society evolved. In 1960, in the obscenity trial over D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the prosecutor asked the jury, "Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" Christopher Hilliard traces the history of British censorship from the Victorians to Margaret Thatcher, exposing the tensions between obscenity law and a changing British society. Hilliard goes behind the scenes of major obscenity trials and uncovers the routines of everyday censorship, shedding new light on the British reception of literary modernism and popular entertainments such as the cinema and American-style pulp fiction and comic books. He reveals the thinking of lawyers and the police, authors and publishers, and politicians and ordinary citizens as they wrestled with questions of freedom and morality. He describes how supporters and opponents of censorship alike tried to remake the law as they reckoned with changes in sexuality and culture that began in the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research, this incisive and multifaceted book reveals how the issue of censorship challenged British society to confront issues ranging from mass literacy and democratization to feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism.

Covers many types of public order and personal dispute situations such as industrial strikes, neighbourhood disputes, investigative reporters and bullying at work. Includes a copy of the Act.

An obsessive word lover provides an account of the year he spent reading the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover, offering a selection of obscure and offbeat vocabulary gems he discovered along the way.

Although erotica has always existed, "pornography" is a recent phenomenon: as late as the eighteenth century the word did not exist. From the secret museums to the pornography trials of Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterly's Lover, to Mapplethorpe, cable TV, and the Internet, Walter Kendrick explores how conceptions of pornography relate to issues of freedom of expression and censorship. He provides, too, a fascinating portrait gallery of the jurists, artists, guardians of public morality, sleaze merchants, and civil libertarians who have played roles in the changing definitions of pornography.