"The idea of prior restraint on a book is odious to me, and we will fight very hard to get this book published," said Thomas J. McCormack, the chairman and chief executive of St . Martins Press.
What made yesterday particularly special was that the authors of one my most treasured books from my boyhood, The Phantom Tollbooth, were at the festival to talk about their new book, The Odious Ogre.
In his new book, Greece's Odious Debt, Jason Manolopoulous notes that of the 151 doctors on the Athens equivalent of Harley Street, 34 last year claimed an annual income of less than €10,000, or £8,770.
Every writer who is original is often doubtful about the value of a work; praise from a critic whom he respects is a treasured reassurance, silence or blame a confirmation of his worst fears: "So I'm found out and that odious rice pudding of a book is what I thought it — a dank failure".
My friends on the left miss the point and the social impact of any kind of censorship imposed on mavericks and offensive speakers -- especially when the pressure groups seek to punish the speaker for simply publishing his odious, ignorant ideas in a book -- which their boisterous protests call more attention to than if they had just let it go.
"The Odious Ogre" is such an attractive book, with such a worthy message, that slight missteps in the text almost don't matter.
"But I am appalled that a book containing insulting and odious remarks about Jews should be published by a firm bearing the name 'Gollancz'".
After the action on chrysotile, Jeffrey Simpson, a columnist for The Globe and Mail, wrote: "We mine asbestos, we ship it, we make money from it, and we'll use every diplomatic trick in the book to defend this odious practice.
Few recalled that in 1933 Nazi students carried torches into the courtyard of the University of Berlin, where they burned books which contravened their odious worldview.
He writes in his book about "a small but odious segment of Googlers" who, among other internal misdemeanours, have abused the free meals system.
