Many of us saw the televised images of protesters burning copies of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses on the streets of Bolton and Bradford after its publication in 1988. The protests were peaceful, but there is something about the destruction of books that has a visceral and chilling effect. It isn’t only that such imagery is redolent of Pathé newsreels of Joseph Goebbels addressing students in Berlin’s Opernplatz, while brownshirts casually toss books into the flames like mere kindling. Nor is it simply the nagging sense that, had the author been present, the crowd would not have
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