Spectator Books

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the chief librarian of Oxford's Bodleian Library, Richard Ovenden. In Burning The Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack, he explores the long history and vital importance of libraries and archives -- and the equally long history of their destruction in acts of war, vandalism or censorship and their loss through attrition and neglect. He tells me about the librarian heroes of Poland and Lithuania, the accidental survival of Magna Carta and what really happened to the Great Library of Alexandria.