The rubric at the start of this remarkable volume is encouraging: 'Everything in this book is true. No names have been changed, there are ... no invented scenes or dialogue.' On the next page, however, the British publishers confess they have had to resile and purge the text to make it fit for the country whose attitude to freedom of expression has recently been judged by Mr Justice Scott to have somewhat too many similarities to places east of the Iron Curtain. 'Because of differences in the American and British legal systems, several names have been deleted from the British edition by the publishers.' Those passages which distressed the lawyers into censorship are tantalisingly signposted by being re-set in lighter type in the text.

LRB 17 March 1988 | PDF Download