![]() Huxley’s Brave New World doesn’t need a daily rewriting of history. Orwell’s Winston Smith, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, works in the Ministry of Truth, which busily rewrites history from day to day, in accordance with what the Party needs people to believe, regardless of whether it is true. Orwell and Huxley would have understood perfectly what’s going on in these stories. Suffice it to say one could begin to build a pretty good education on the foundation laid by works the British government is concerned about. ![]() The list included works by Tolkien, Conrad, Kipling (again!), Tennyson, Chesterton, Huxley, Orwell, Milton, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, as well as films such as The Great Escape, Zulu, and The Bridge on the River Kwai, and the Kenneth Clark art history series “Civilisation”. The third story, which I did not see any US media outlet notice, was that the Research Information and Communications Unit, part of Prevent, itself an arm of the UK’s Home Office charged with enforcing the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, had identified certain books, films, and television shows that were on favoured “reading lists” of right-wing terror groups the unit was keeping tabs on. It’s a wonder he’s still licensed to kill. Henceforth James Bond, of all people, will try hard not to disturb the prejudices of a typical humanities professor of 2023. The sexism of Agent 007, and his retrograde racial views, were gone over with a fine-tooth comb, with the approval of Ian Fleming Publications. The second story, which did not get much attention in the United States, was that a similar “sensitivity revision” has been performed on the James Bond books of the late Ian Fleming. But the bowdlerized editions have not been withdrawn, as they should be. Puffin later announced that “classic” editions of Dahl’s books-with unchanged texts-would continue to be available for future purchase. ![]() Subsequent reports informed us that purchasers of ebook copies of Dahl’s children’s stories would see these changes made in the copies they had previously bought but that were stored on vendors’ servers-yet another reason to own paper copies of books. Christopher Scalia added in the Washington Examiner that “this compulsion not to offend is especially strange regarding Dahl, whose work is distinctively unsettling. The result would be to eliminate references “to fatness, craziness, ugliness, whiteness (even of bedsheets), blackness (even of tractors) and the great Rudyard Kipling,” among other changes, as Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote in the Wall Street Journal. First, with the approval of the Roald Dahl Story Company, holder of the rights to the late author’s works, the publisher Puffin Books (a Penguin Random House imprint) announced that Dahl’s celebrated children’s books would henceforth be published in revised editions reflecting the changes recommended by “sensitivity readers.” In the last month, three news stories out of Britain have seized the attention of book lovers.
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