ABSTRACT
It is a false assumption that institutionalised censorship belongs exclusively to the realms of dictatorship. Steve Nicholson’s intriguing essay on the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship ofce in Britain and Vicki Cremona’s account of Maltese state censorship, for instance, remind the reader that overt censorship of theatre and other cultural forms occurred and continues to occur in modern democratic societies as well. Studies comparing the censorship practices of despotic and democratic countries are certainly welcome and also required to understand the multifaceted and complex mechanisms of information control. It is also a false assumption, however, that censorship carried out by authoritarian regimes is simple or homogeneous. This chapter focuses on two contrasting twentieth-century political systems, Estado Novo Portugal (1933-74) and People’s Republic of Hungary (1949-89), which both set out to exercise tight ideological and cultural control but in very different ways.
