The immediate reason for the publication of this book is the suggested amendment to criminal law in Britain, seeking to prevent any work from inciting religious hatred. Under this law, no work of art and imagination will be considered fit for public display or consumption if it makes comments deemed derogatory to any religion or faith. The resonance with similar issues in India is strong, but the comparison is not quite valid.

Noises that violate free speech, part and parcel of countless ham-handed bids to appease minorities, are too common in India to provoke outrage, but not so in Britain. Some of the essayists here — among them Salman Rushdie, Gurpreet Bhatti, Madhav Sharma, Monica Ali, Frances D’Souza and Rowan Atkinson — attempt a critical evaluation of the way the changed law might test and affect the foundations on which western democracies have been built. Most of the pieces in this category offer an analysis of the immediate dangers that accompany the passing of the law and show how the British establishment has let politico-religious correctness bypass good sense.

The rest of the essays discuss everything from art and identity to civil liberty, science, history and politics. The wide range of references is both pleasing and frightening; we find that there are as many ways free speech is endorsed as it is gagged and maimed. There is, for example, a seamless continuity between the practice of suppressing speech in Renaissance Europe and similar happenings today. This despite the paradigm shift in ideas, politics and the nature of civil society in the intervening period.

Most the articles in the collection, edited by Lisa Appignanesi, are lucid and forcefully argued, never failing to prove a point, deliver a statement, register a reminder. What remains with the reader is a lingering taste of sadness — that such a book is still in need of publication; that, two centuries after the Enlightenment, we need to remind ourselves of the importance of expressing ideas with freedom.

A civilization as forgetful as ours needs, perhaps, to be reminded about its strengths and achievements. We are, perhaps, a childlike people who undo a day’s good work on the morrow.

These essays are a welcome, and timely, addition to the debate raging over freedom of expression in the wake of the ‘cartoon fire’ that originated in Denmark. Free Expression is No Offence explores what is at stake when illiberal powers dominate men, mind and markets, why the unrestricted articulation of ideas is being held captive, and why it is worth fighting for. The fears expressed now seem eerily prescient.

Ask the Danish cartoonists.

Free Expression is no Offence | Lisa Appignanesi | Penguin | 2006 | 272pp