Charles Egbiremolen operated eight bedsits without a licence in a converted three-bedroom house.

“After a long illness, the world as we know it has passed away,” a European friend recently said. A slightly premature obituary, perhaps, but not by much. The world has changed in fundamental ways, of which the Trump administration is both symptom and cause. There is no greater evidence than its emerging policy of imposing a cease-fire, which it incorrectly believes will bring peace, on Ukraine.

To a degree surprising for those who think of the Trump administration as a mere composite of malice, nihilism, and chaos, its Ukraine policy seems orchestrated, with three big pieces dropping yesterday alone.

The first was a speech from Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth at the 50-nation meeting of the Ukraine-defense-support group. Uncharacteristically, perhaps, his words deserve careful parsing, particularly because they have caused spasms of despair—some justified, most not—among supporters of Ukraine.

[Read: The day the Ukraine War ended]

He began by uttering the uncomfortable truth that it is unrealistic to expect a return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders. That is unfortunate but ineluctable, given the balance on the battlefield and the unwillingness of both the Biden administration and the current one to pour in the military resources that would give Ukraine a chance of defeating Russia. Unfair, tragically unnecessary, but true.

Hegseth ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine as part of a negotiated settlement—also unfair, but also inevitable. Ascension to NATO membership is a long process, and in any case, Russia’s surrogates in NATO—Hungary and now Slovakia—would almost certainly block Ukraine. Hegseth’s statement matters less than many suppose, however, because a new administration could just as easily reverse this policy.

The peace deal—which he insisted would be brokered by the United States but not, apparently, with Europeans as part of the negotiation—would have to be guaranteed by “European and non-European” military forces in Ukraine; U.S. forces, he emphasized, would not be stationed there. Left unsaid was whether, say, American combat aircraft and missiles might be permanently based in neighboring countries.

In one of the more interesting sections, he said:

To further enable effective diplomacy and drive down energy prices that fund the Russian war machine, President Trump is unleashing American energy production and encouraging other nations to do the same. Lower energy prices coupled with more effective enforcement of energy sanctions will help bring Russia to the table.

To European ears, it was probably blotted out by what came soon after:

Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this, Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.

Not unreasonable, although, in fact, Europe has provided almost as much military aid to Ukraine as has the United States, and more humanitarian aid.

This was not a speech about abandoning Europe or, for that matter, Ukraine. Rather, Hegseth insisted that the United States has to focus on securing its own border and meeting the challenge posed by “Communist China”:

Our transatlantic alliance has endured for decades. And we fully expect that it will be sustained for generations to come. But this won’t just happen.

It will require our European allies to step into the arena and take ownership of conventional security on the continent.

The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe. Full stop.

The bottom line is that the administration will broker, and possibly coerce, a deal that is bad for Ukraine: a cease-fire along current lines, the deployment of European and other forces, and no chance of NATO membership in the near future. There was, however, talk of economic pressure on Russia, of security arrangements for Ukraine, and of an American interest in seeing the war end permanently. What was not mentioned, however, is also important. There was no talk of regime change in Ukraine or of limiting Ukraine’s armed forces and their development. There was no talk of abandoning or fundamentally restructuring NATO and the European security system. All of these contradict Vladimir Putin’s stated war aims.

None of this will assuage the fears of those who believe that Donald Trump is eager to sell Ukraine to Russia, bend to Putin’s every whim, and destroy NATO. But that view disregards some important evidence.

[Charles A. Kupchan: Trump is right that Pax Americana is over]

The second big piece of the Trump peace initiative was the president’s statement—a blurt rather than a formal release—on Truth Social declaring that he had had a long conversation with Putin and that they would at some point meet with each other. Reading it, one is reminded, once again, that Trump is a politician who is cunning but semiliterate and ignorant. The statement, unfortunately, assumes a commonality of interests and experiences that simply does not exist between Russia and the United States.

In a meeting, one has to expect that Putin, a former KGB case officer, will be far better at manipulating the vain and erratic Trump than the other way around. Moreover, when Trump said that he was just about to call Volodymyr Zelensky to brief him on the conversation, he revealed that he had already violated what should be a cardinal principle: no attempt to make a deal on Ukraine without Ukraine. His mistake is dangerous, possibly disastrously so. That said, however, it is clear from other statements (including Hegseth’s) that Trump believes that he is the one with economic leverage (true), that the war is stupid (true), and that Russia is in substantial difficulty (true).

The third initiative—curiously missed by much of the American press—was the first visit of a Cabinet-level official to Kyiv. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent presented a deal, the outlines of which are unclear, to give the United States access to Ukrainian minerals, and the Ukrainian government, unsurprisingly, responded positively. Crass and unworthy, no doubt, but a good thing. The United States has strong interests in securing a supply of rare earths from a friendly, aligned country rather than from China. If a deal goes ahead, the U.S. will have large security as well as economic interests in an independent Ukraine. And the mood music was good: “By increasing our economic commitment through a partnership with the government and people of Ukraine, that will provide—once this conflict is over—it will provide a long-term security shield for all Ukrainians,” Bessent said.

There were always two possible Trump Ukraine policies: the bad and the catastrophic. At the moment, this seems bad—but not yet catastrophic. A peace deal that leaves Ukraine with 80 percent of its territory and its independence, economic stability, and military potential unimpaired, and that stations European troops inside its territory while giving the U.S. a large economic interest in its future, is an acceptable if unfortunate and avoidable outcome.

Responsibility for this war arriving at a bad outcome rests with the Trump administration, which is nakedly transactional and, worse, either does not understand or does not care that this war is about a Russian bid to restore its imperial status. But others are to blame as well.

The Biden administration warned of the war but botched the provision of aid to Ukraine. It held back the quality and quantity of weapons needed for victory, decided to have no strategy for success other than “standing by Ukraine,” and inexcusably failed to explain to the American people why this war was, and is, central to American security interests. The Biden administration set the conditions for the current situation.

[From the March 2025 issue: Europe’s Elon Musk problem]

The other players responsible for this situation are America’s European allies. Not all of them, to be sure—the Nordic and Baltic states and Poland have stepped up, as Hegseth openly acknowledged. For more than a generation now, American leaders have insisted to Europe as a whole that Americans will not indefinitely bear the burden of Europe’s security. By and large, their European counterparts have smiled politely and ignored them. No wonder then, that the secretary of defense said:

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense—nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.

Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders … may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.

Pete Hegseth? No, Robert Gates—who served as secretary of defense more than 14 years ago in the Obama administration—diagnosing the illness that has brought about this crisis. The good news, such as it is, is that the patient needed, and may yet respond to, the blunt truths about its condition that Secretary Hegseth expressed. Sometimes shock therapy, however inexpertly administered, can be part of the cure.

King Charles throws an NFL ball on a visit to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Charles Todd issued a mayday call from his yacht as Storm Herminia hit the Bay of Biscay.

King Charles praises the culture of Italian cooking as he hosts a dinner ahead of a state visit to Italy.

Photographs by Chris Hoare

Several stories below the British Library’s Magna Carta room, alongside a rumbling line of the London Underground, is a brightly lit labyrinth of rare and historic items. Past a series of antique rifles chained to a wall, past an intricate system of conveyor belts whisking books to the surface, the library stores an enormous collection of plays, manuscripts, and letters. Last spring, I checked my belongings at security and descended to sift through this archive—a record of correspondence between the producers and directors of British theater and a small team of censors who once worked for the Crown.

For centuries, these strict, dyspeptic, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious bureaucrats read and passed judgment on every public theatrical production in Britain, striking out references to sex, God, and politics, and forcing playwrights to, as one put it, cook their “conceptions to the taste of authority.” They reported to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which in 1737 became responsible for granting licenses to theaters and approving the texts of plays. “Examiners” made sure that no productions would offend the sovereign, blaspheme the Church, or stir audiences to political radicalism. An 1843 act expanded the department’s powers, calling upon it to block any play that threatened not just the “Public Peace” but “Decorum” and “good Manners.”

Hardly chosen for their artistic sensibilities or knowledge of theatrical history, the men hired by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office were mostly retired military officers from the upper-middle class. From the Victorian era on, they scrutinized plays for references to racial equality and sexuality—particularly homosexuality—vulgar language, and “offensive personalities,” as one guideline put it.

Twentieth-century English theater was, as a result of all this vigilance, “subject to more censorship than in the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I,” wrote the playwright and former theater critic Nicholas de Jongh in his 2000 survey of censorship, Politics, Prudery and Perversions. The censors suppressed or bowdlerized countless works of genius. As I thumbed through every play I could think of from the 1820s to the 1960s (earlier manuscripts, sold as part of an examiner’s private archive, can be seen in the Huntington Library in California), it became clear that the censors only got stricter—and more prudish—over time.

[Read: When the culture wars came for the theater]

“Do not come to me with Ibsen,” warned the examiner E. F. Smyth Pigott, nicely demonstrating the censors’ habitual tone. He had “studied Ibsen’s plays pretty carefully,” and determined that the characters were, to a man, “morally deranged.”

In cardboard boxes stacked on endless rows of metal shelving, string-tie binders hold the original versions of thousands of plays. The text of each is accompanied by a typewritten “Readers’ Report,” most of them several pages long, summarizing the plot and cataloging the work’s flaws as well as any redeeming qualities. That is followed, when available, by typed and handwritten correspondence between the censors and the applicants (usually the play’s hopeful and ingratiating producers).

These reports can at times be as entertaining as the plays themselves. On Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, one examiner wrote: “Omit the business and speeches about flybuttons”; on Sartre’s Huis Clos: “The play illustrates very well the difference between the French and English tastes. I don’t suppose that anyone would bat an eyelid over in Paris, but here we bar Lesbians on the stage”; on Camus’ Caligula: “This is the sort of play for which I have no liking at all”; on Tennessee Williams: “Neuroses grin through everything he writes”; and on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun: “A good play about negroes in a Chicago slum, written with dignity, power and complete freedom from whimsy. The title is taken from a worthless piece of occasional verse about dreams deferred drying up like a raisin in the sun—or festering and exploding.”

[Ethan Zuckerman: America is no longer the home of the free internet]

These bureaucrats were eager, as one of them wrote, to “lop off a few excrescent boughs” to save the tree. They were anti-Semitic (one successful compromise involved replacing a script’s use of “Fuck the Pope” with “The Pope’s a Jew”) and virulently homophobic. In response to Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, in 1958, one Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Troubridge noted: “There was a great fuss in New York about the references to cannibalism at the end of this play, but the Lord Chamberlain will find more objectionable the indications that the dead man was a homosexual.”

But the censors could also, occasionally, aspire to the level of pointed and biting literary criticism. “This is a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett,” the report for a 1960 production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker begins, “though it has not that author’s vein of nihilistic pessimism, and each individual sentence is comprehensible if irrelevant.” One gets the impression that, like the characters from a Bolaño novel, at least some of these men were themselves failed artists and intellectuals, drawn to such authoritarian work from a place of bruised and envious ego.

Indeed, one examiner, Geoffrey Dearmer, considered among the more flexible, had written poetry during the Great War. He reported to the Lord Chamberlain alongside the tyrannical Charles Heriot, who had studied theater at university and worked on a production of Macbeth before moving, still as a young man, into advertising, journalism, and book publishing. He was known, de Jongh wrote, for being “gratuitously abusive.” (Heriot on Edward Bond’s 1965 Saved: “A revolting amateur play … about a bunch of brainless, ape-like yobs,” including a “brainless slut of twenty-three living with her sluttish parents.”) Another examiner, George Alexander Redford, was a bank manager chosen primarily because he was friends with the man he succeeded. When asked about the criteria he used in his decision making, Redford answered, “I have no critical view on plays.” He was “simply bringing to bear an official point of view and keeping up a standard. … There are no principles that can be defined. I follow precedent.”

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticAn examiner’s notes on Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The director Peter Hall, writing in The Guardian in 2002 about his experiences with the censors, said that the office “was largely staffed by retired naval officers with extraordinarily filthy minds. They were so alert to filth that they often found it when none was intended.” Once, he called to ask why some lines had been cut from a play he was directing:

“We all know what’s going on here, Hall, don’t we?” said the retired naval officer angrily. “It’s up periscopes.” “Up periscopes?” I queried. “Buggery, Hall, buggery!” Actually, it wasn’t.

As comic as these men seem now, they wielded enormous, unexamined power. The correspondence filed alongside the manuscripts reveals the extent to which the pressures of censorship warped manuscripts long before they even arrived on the censors’ desks. Managers and production companies checked scripts and suggested changes in anticipation of scrutiny. In a 1967 letter, a representative of a dramatic society eager to stage Waiting for Godot writes, “On page 81 Estragon says ‘Who farted?’ The director and myself are concerned as to whether, during a public presentation, this might offend the laws of censorship. Awaiting your advice.” Presumably, the answer was affirmative.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticAn examiner’s report on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Playwrights also performed their own “pre-pre-censorship”—limiting the scope of their subject matter before and during the writing process. According to the 2004 book The Lord Chamberlain Regrets … A History of British Theatre Censorship, as far back as 1866, the comptroller of the LCO, Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, “explicitly commended examiners for operating this ‘indirect system of censorship’ because it enabled the Office to keep the number of prohibited plays to a minimum and forestall concerns about repression.”

Some plays made it past the censors only as a result of human error. When I met Kate Dossett, a professor at the University of Leeds who specializes in Black-theater history, she told me that the case of the playwright Una Marson is an example of what “gets hidden in this collection.” Marson’s 1932 play, At What a Price, depicts a young Black woman from the Jamaican countryside who moves to Kingston and takes a job as a stenographer. Her white employer seduces—or, in today’s understanding, sexually harasses—and impregnates her. The drama is a subtle exploration of miscegenation, one of the core taboos that the LCO often clamped down on. But the play was approved because the examiner—confused by the protagonist’s class markers and education—didn’t realize that she was Black.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticThe script of Una Marson’s At What a Price

“This play is to be produced by the League of Coloured Peoples but it seems to have no particular relation to the objects of that institution except that the scene is in Jamaica and some of the minor characters are coloured and speak a more or less diverting dialect,” the report states. “The main story is presumably about English people and is an old-fashioned artless affair.”

From the beginning, some prominent figures fought against the system of censorship. Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa bears the distinction of having been the first British play banned under the Licensing Act of 1737. The work, ostensibly about the Swedish liberator Gustav I, was interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Responding to the ban in a satirical defense of the censors, Samuel Johnson wrote that the government should go further, and make it a “felony to teach to read without a license from the lord chamberlain.” Only then would citizens be able to rest, in “ignorance and peace,” and the government be safe from “the insults of the poets.”

Universal History Archive / GettyA cartoon from 1874 satirized the Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to clean up the stage.

Henry James, in his day, spoke out in defense of the English playwright, who “has less dignity—thanks to the censor’s arbitrary rights upon his work—than that of any other man of letters in Europe.” So, too, did George Bernard Shaw. “It is a frightful thing to see the greatest thinkers, poets and authors of modern Europe, men like Ibsen,” Shaw wrote, “delivered helplessly into the vulgar hands of such a noodle as this despised and incapable old official.”

By the time the Theatres Act of 1968 abolished the censorship of plays, social attitudes were changing. The influx of workers from Jamaica and other countries in the Commonwealth in the 1950s challenged the stability of racial dynamics; sex between men was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967; divorce became more common; and the rock-and-roll era destigmatized drugs. For years, theaters had been taking advantage of a loophole: Because the LCO’s jurisdiction applied only to public performances, theaters could charge patrons a nominal membership fee, thereby transforming themselves into private subscription clubs out of the censors’ reach.

It must have gotten lonely, trying to stand so long against the changing times. “I don’t understand this,” Heriot wrote, plaintively, about Hair. The American musical was banned three times for extolling “dirt, anti-establishment views, homosexuality and free love,” but in the end, one gets the impression that the censors just gave up. Alexander Lock, a curator at the library, pointed me to Heriot’s report on the final version of the musical. The pain of defeat in his voice is almost palpable: “A curiously half-hearted attempt to vet the script” had been made, he wrote, but many offenses were left intact.

Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in September 1968. That month, by royal assent, no new plays required approval from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which was left to devote its attention to the planning of royal weddings, funerals, and garden parties.

Some may be tempted to dismiss the censors’ legacy as limited to, as a 1967 article in The Times of London had it, “the trivia of indecency.” But the damage was far deeper. The censors, de Jongh wrote, stunted English theater, kept it frivolous and parochial, and prevented it from dealing with “the greatest issues and anguishes of this violent century.” No playwrights addressed “the fascist regimes of the 1930s, the process that led to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ghastliness perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin, or the tyrannies experienced in China and under other totalitarian leaderships. No wonder. Their plays would have been disallowed. In the 1930s you could not win licences for plays that might offend Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin.” Shakespeare never “had to put up with” censorship so “rigorous and narrow-minded,” Peter Hall wrote. His “richest plays and his finest lines, packed with erotic double meanings, would have been smartly excised by the Lord Chamberlain’s watchdogs.”

[From the January 1930 issue: Edward Weeks on the practice of censorship]

These practices may strike us today as outlandish and anachronistic. Many of us take for granted creative license and the freedom of expression that undergirds it. But the foundation upon which these rights—as we think of them—are situated is far less immutable than we would like to imagine. As recent trends in the United States and elsewhere have shown, advances toward greater tolerance are reversible.

Indeed, many Americans on both the right and the left correctly sense this, even if they do not always understand what genuine censorship looks like. Activists on college campuses have confused the ability to occupy and disrupt physical space for the right to dissent verbally. Meanwhile, Elon Musk warns that “wokeness” will stifle free speech even as he uses the social-media site he owns to manipulate public debate.

Perusing the plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s archive is, among other things, a reminder of what censorship really is: government power applied to speech to either limit or compel it. And it is also a reminder that in the long term, many such attempts backfire. They reveal, as Sir Roly Keating, who was chief executive of the library from 2012 until the beginning of this year, told me, more about the censors’ own “fears, paranoias, obsessions” than they ever succeed in concealing.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticInside the archive 

There is also the sheer fact of what Keating called “this extraordinary imposition of bureaucracy.” Just as the Stasi archive provides unparalleled insight into the interplay of art and politics in postwar East German society, and the Hoover-era FBI’s copious files on Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and other Black American luminaries amount to a valuable cultural repository, the Lord Chamberlain’s archive can now be seen as one of the preeminent collections of Black and queer theater in the English-speaking world. It includes not just the plays that were staged, but also those that were rejected, and in some cases multiple drafts of them. These are precisely the kinds of works that, without the backing of institutions that have the resources to protect their own archive, might have been lost to history.

“Theater’s an ephemeral medium,” Keating told me. “Early drafts of plays change all the time; many don’t get published at all.” Among the many ramifications of censorship, I had not adequately considered this one: the degree to which methodical suppression can create the most meticulous collection. It is a deeply satisfying justice—even a form of revenge—that the hapless bureaucrats who endeavored so relentlessly to squelch and block independent thought have instead so painstakingly preserved it for future generations.

Support for this article was provided by the British Library’s Eccles Institute for the Americas & Oceania Phil Davies Fellowship. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “All the King’s Censors.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The project is expected to highlight his environmental charity work in the UK and overseas.

The King will be at an event for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp.