For as long as people have been writing, there have been other people that want to prevent that writing from reaching the public. Around 600BC King Jehoiakim of Judah burnt a scroll containing a prophecy he did not like. Plato supposedly loathed work by Democritus, another philosopher, and sought to have it destroyed. (Ironically in his dialogues he warns of “the danger of becoming misologists”—ie, people who hate reasoning or ideas.)

Censorship is still firmly in fashion. In America, the land of the free, youngsters cannot read freely: according to PEN America, a non-profit organisation, more than 4,000 books were banned from schools in the 2023-24 academic year. Governments around the world are keeping an ever-closer close eye on the written word. Since 2013, 6.2bn people across 78 countries have “experienced a deterioration of their freedom of expression”, according to the Global Expression Report, which tracks free speech. Read our list of the eight books that have been pulled from shelves from Italy to Uzbekistan.