Sarah Harte: Sanitising literature serves to cover up critiques of hateful attitudes

The brouhaha around the edits made to the late Roald Dahl’s books is interesting, in how it has provoked a diverse array of comments from a varied cast of characters

A scene in the Broadway production of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, by Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin is widely regarded as a master storyteller, but has been critiqued for his liberal 'tendency to write around facts that contradict his overall argument' so 'he can come out on the right side of history'. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty

The brouhaha around the edits made to the late Roald Dahl’s books by his publisher Puffin is interesting, in how it has provoked a diverse array of comments from a varied cast of characters.

Last Saturday in this paper, Séamas O’Reilly (a childhood fan of the books), questioned if we wanted Dahl’s books “frozen in amber” and thought the changes were made in a commercial context by the publishers and were long overdue. But Michael Moynihan saw it as a “dangerous precedent” and wondered who might be censored next.