Welcome to Just Between Us, the podcast with all of the answers, some of the time.

A bit of a different thing going on this week.

You've been immature and you've lied.

And now you're trying to turn it on me and manipulate me and gaslight me.

I was trying to manipulate you.

Diana, you would be chucking their clothes out of the window.

I know, I'd be like, are you joking?

I don't know.

I guess you'd have to ask someone that has sex. Someone that podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's

best-selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Cawthorne. According to author Eric Berkovitz, the compulsion to eradicate views that we find

inconvenient or unpalatable is hardwired into humanity. And history is full of examples of

censorship, from the First Emperors of Rome through Henry

the 8th to the American judiciary of the First World War. But Eric argues in his new book

Dangerous Ideas that censorship never really works. Here, in conversation with our production

editor, Spentemizism, he explains why.

Eric, reading your new book, it soon becomes evident that the issue of censorship and the way in which we perceive history are inextricably linked.

You cite in the book, George Orwell's quote, that censors tend to believe that history is to be created rather than learned.

So my first question, I guess, is why have censors from China's first emperor who burned books and buried alive hundreds of scholars to the Spanish invaders who destroyed the Maya civilization's

most sacred texts. Why have they been so keen to rewrite or eradicate history? You know, it's not

just censors. I think it's all of us. It's interesting. I mean, as history departments close left

and right and its history becomes

...