Free Speech by Timothy Garton Ash review – coping with the internet as ‘history’s largest sewer’

This is a thought-provoking manifesto for a ‘connected world’, a suggested agreement on how we disagree. But is freedom of expression what Garton Ash says it is?

In the 1980s, Timothy Garton Ash made his name as a brilliant reporter on central and eastern European politics. He was spied on by the Stasi (who code named him “Romeo”), made friends with dissident writers, politicians and journalists, and experienced first hand what it was like to live in a world of totalitarianism, censorship, secret police and samizdat publishing.

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