a sentence of eight years-which, in effect, will be four or five
years.

I asked the publisher the impossible question of whether she would have
published the book if someone close to her had not had such firsthand
experience of the frivolous leniency of the British criminal-justice
system. She said she thought so: but what is beyond dispute is that the
murder made her publication of the book a certainty.

A Land Fit for Criminals has sold well and has been very widely
discussed, though not by the most important liberal newspapers, which
would find the whole subject in bad taste. But the book's publishing
history demonstrates how close we have come to an almost totalitarian
uniformity of the sayable, imposed informally by right-thinking people
in the name of humanity, but in utter disregard for the truth and the
reality of their fellow citizens' lives. Better that they, the
right-thinking, should feel