Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator for The Spectator.

And this week, my guest is Bodley's librarian, the Supremo of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Richard

Ovendon. His new book is called Burning the Books,

A History of Knowledge Under Attack. Richard, welcome. Now, you do begin with what we now think

are probably as a sort of lockers, classic as a book burning, the Nazis, burnings, you know, prohibited and dissident

and decadent literature in the public square. But the origin of this book is more recent, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. Although that incident itself came to me quite vividly when I was visiting Berlin in 2018.

We have a collaboration with the State Library of Berlin,

and I went to a meeting there and just happened to be crossing the street,

under Denlinda, right at the heart of Berlin,

waiting for the meeting, waiting to sort of go into their building

there and stumbled upon the site of the famous book burnings of the 10th of May, 1933,

which is kind of commemorated by a plaque, quite a very moving one actually. But it just really

struck me that this didn't happen that long ago.

You know, my mum, who's happy to stay still with us, was alive when that event took place.

And it struck me that, you know, we forget these things at our peril.

But the more kind of the real trigger for me was the revelation during the windrush revelations, as it were, back also in 2018,

that the Home Office, of course, instigating the hostile environment had deliberately destroyed an archive of records, which the same citizens who were being targeted

by the same government department could have used to help make their case for settled status or

right to remain. And this struck me as a very good example of the social importance of the

preservation of knowledge. We should say, as you do con example of the social importance of the preservation of knowledge.

We should say, as you do conceded the book, that particular instance, that distraction

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