Bush's celebrity critics are victims of freedom, not censorship

DISCRIMINATION AGAINST males is so widespread in so many fields that it is not surprising that a wide variety of tactics have been adopted by those stronger-minded men with the guts to fight it. Hence the range of approaches reported by Pyke, Usborne, O'Sullivan and Clement (12 December) are the tip of the iceberg, and evidence of male creativity rather than confusion and conflict.

`I was asked if it were true that we censors find explicit sex more acceptable if it occurs in a foreign-language film'

You thought a game was the same the world over? Think again. The Germans can't stand gore and Americans don't like anything difficult

THE RUCKUS in New York over the travelling Sensation exhibition of works by young British artists, including Damien Hirst and Chris Ofili, intensified last night after the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where the pieces are to be shown, announced that it had sued the city for threatening to cut off its funding.

Today, The Independent begins a major new series on pornography and popular culture. The first part looks at how our attitudes have changed over the years - and asks, can anything shock us now?

Sir: Did Yasmin Alibhai-Brown really mean to write, "Those people who burnt The Satanic Verses in Bradford were accused of censorship when what they were doing was expressing their rage at their own lack of any power in this country" ("Sex, politics and censorship", 9 September)?

The former director of the British Board of Film Classification replies to a recent article by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown headlined `Sex, politics and censorship'

DON'T GET me wrong. I am not turning into a follower of Peter Hitchens who, in his new, desperately nostalgic book, The Abolition of Britain, bemoans our descent into immorality and pornography, which started with the obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover. "Batty" (according to Will Hutton) Hitchens longs for a return to good, old-fashioned censorship and reverence for establishment authority. I don't. But I do think that a society without any restraints becomes morally corrupt, and that "censorship" has become a meaningless word used in the same way as "Communism" in the United States .

Sir: The banning of black make-up for white actors by a local authority in Warwickshire ( report, 26 August) is as absurd and unhelpful as the idea that Verdi's Otello must be a black tenor or Shakespeare's Shylock a Jew. This is the theatre, for God's sake. Make-up is just a mask.

SIR STUART HAMPSON, the chairman of the UK retailer John Lewis Partnership, has quashed the hopes of the company's 39,000 staff that they could be in line for pounds 100,000 windfalls raised from the sale of the business.

FIRST THE gun lobby, now Hollywood. As the US struggles to make sense of the recent spate of school shootings and work out who to blame for turning white middle-class teenagers into mass murderers, the heat has turned from a badly scalded National Rifle Association to the entertainment industry.

games.Kingpin.

IT IS one of the most famous lines in movie history but it almost never made it to the big screen. Cinema audiences all over the world have sobbed at the final moments of Gone with the Wind when Rhett Butler turns to Scarlett O'Hara and says with chilling disdain: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."