April 16, 2002 (Tuesday)
Key West (Florida)

A TOTAL of 151 e-mails are waiting for me already this morning. One from the London leftwing magazine The New Statesman -- they are refusing to carry our advertisement for Churchill's War and Hitler's War. Their advertising manager Claire Henderson has been badgering us for the last three weeks with emails, faxes, and phone calls to give them the advertisement, and we submitted the artwork to them on the agreed date last week, together with payment for £2,700. They now email:

I am e-mailing you to let you know that we are not able to carry the advert for you. The artwork is being returned to you first class and will be sent back to the Duke Street address. Yours Claire Henderson

I reply:

I am sorry to have delayed replying to your message. I am starting a one month speaking tour of the US -- it goes to all four corners.

You inform me that despite our contract which you faxed through to us and we have fulfilled you are not now carrying the advertisement. This is after you or your colleagues on several occasions contacted us pressing for the advertisement, of whose content you were aware of course since we sent to you last month a hard copy printed draft of it, and we drew your attention again to the online version. Will you please inform me of

• what editorial or other changes would make the advertisement acceptable?
• what has led the New Statesman to break its contract in this manner?

I shall meanwhile invite my legal adviser to consider the implications of the above. I am very sorry that your magazine has changed its mind, as it has of course inflicted unnecessary costs on us, and probable financial loss too.

I suspect that the magazine has fallen a victim to self-censorship -- the same kind of insidious censorship as afflicted Marty Cummins, who owns the Orlando bookstore Chapters where I was scheduled to speak the day after tomorrow; he also cancelled the fixture last week, at such short notice that I have been unable to reroute the crates of books that I shipped to his address, or notify everybody who is planning to go there. In thirty years of public appearances I have never let down an audience, however small, and I hate it when the weakness of others creates a situation like this.