What Price Liberty? How Freedom Was Won and Is Being Lost
By Ben Wilson
Faber £14.99, 480 pages
(e-book and pdf from www.whatpriceliberty.co.uk)
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

I confess I was left a little puzzled by the recent exhibition at the British Library, Taking Liberties: The Struggle for Britain’s Freedoms and Rights. By arranging the display around 40 documents described as “key icons of liberty and progress”, including the 1942 Beveridge Report and the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, the curators left little room for the possibility that individual freedom might actually have receded in recent times. Yet the exhibition opened just four months after the House of Commons voted to extend to 42 days the time a person suspected of terrorist acts can be detained without charge.