Review: Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantasy novel The Buried Giant, a great mist erases the collective memory, leaving the story’s characters “unable to access the past and with it to move forward into the future” [1]. The idea of collective forgetting is almost impossible to imagine in our own world, with the unfathomable amount of information available on the web. And yet to bastardise a Cecil Null line, humans have forgotten more than the web will ever know. Reflecting on this is no bad thing; doing somethin...