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Decisions of what to keep and what to cull.

A 3000 year journey through the destruction of knowledge and the fight against all the odds to preserve it.

Richard Ovenden, director of the Bodleian Library, explains how attacks on libraries and archives have been a feature of history since ancient times, but have increased in frequency and intensity during the modern era.

Libraries are far more than stores of literature, through preserving the legal documents such as Magna Carta and records of citizenship they also support the rule of law and the rights of citizens.

The knowledge they hold on behalf of society is under attack as never before.

At once a powerful history of civilisation and a manifesto for the vital importance of physical libraries in our increasingly digital age, Burning the Books is also a very human story animated by an unlikely cast of adventurers, self-taught archaeologists, poets, freedom-fighters - and, of course, librarians and the heroic lengths they will go to preserve and rescue knowledge.

Richard Ovenden demonstrates fundamentally how knowledge of the past still has so many valuable lessons to teach us and we ignore it at our peril.

Abridged by Siân Preece.

Read by Anthony Head.

Producer: Jill Waters

A Waters Company production for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4, first broadcast in September 2020.

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