Burning The Books
Richard Ovenden John Murray £20
Throughout history there has been as great an urge to eradicate knowledge as to preserve it. As Richard Ovenden says in this stirring volume, ‘knowledge holds great power, the pursuit of gathering and preserving it is a valuable task, and its loss can be an early warning sign of a decaying civilisation’.
From 1933 the Nazis systematically ransacked the public libraries of the Reich, burning books written by Jews, communists and homosexuals. ‘You do well,’ exhorted Goebbels, ‘to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed.’
And so has it been for millennia. Ovenden reminds us of the loss of the library in Alexandria, in ancient times, when 500,000 scrolls were used as fuel to heat bath water.
From 1933 the Nazis systematically ransacked the public libraries of the Reich, burning books written by Jews, communists and homosexuals
Sappho’s lesbian poems were destroyed ‘on moral grounds’, and it is possible that entire unknown works by Homer and Seneca went up in smoke.
The first thing a new regime or invading army does, to make its presence felt, is smash the treasures and relics of the old regime. This happened not only in classical Greece and Rome, but in Bosnia, in 1992, when university libraries in Sarajevo were deliberately shelled.
When a party knows its days in power are numbered, again the state records face destruction. The Soviet Union, East Germany and Romania are obvious examples – but Ovenden tells us that when the British left Africa and the Far East, colonial administrators hid evidence of racist and prejudiced behaviour.
The greatest period of vandalism, nevertheless, was in the 16th Century, during the Reformation, when Henry VIII became head of the Church in England and broke with the Pope in Rome.
Monastic libraries were sacked, medieval illuminated manuscripts plundered. The Book Of Kells, now in Dublin, survived ‘the state sponsorship of this destruction’ only by chance, when the abbot, at personal risk to himself, stole it away.
‘Hundreds of thousands of books were destroyed,’ says Ovenden – you can almost hear him weeping.
Ovenden is the chieftain at the Bodleian, Oxford’s library. His point is how fragile all these methods of ‘documenting civilisation’ can be. Not only are there wars and explosions, but paper archives are ‘highly combustible’, or else at risk from mould, floods and insects.
Then there is the cold fact that not everyone is so keen on clinging to the truth. Byron’s publishers burned his memoirs in the grate. Sylvia Plath’s journals were destroyed by Ted Hughes ‘to protect Hughes’s own reputation’.
These were unforgivable literary crimes.
Finally, there is the tragic statistic that local authority budgets for public libraries were slashed by £30 million in 2017/2018 alone. Those that haven’t closed completely are now ‘community hubs’ where you can pick up leaflets about cycle trails or mobile chiropodists.
A Short History Of The World According To Sheep
Sally Coulthard Apollo £16.99
Rating: 
In 2004, residents of the Yorkshire village of Marsden faced a mystery. Despite the cattle grids installed to keep sheep that grazed the surrounding moors out of the village, the creatures had suddenly begun to break into gardens and chow down on the lawns and flower beds.
The grids were far too wide to leap, and their bars too tricky for little hooves, so how on earth, the villagers asked themselves, were the sheep getting in?
It was only when a local caught one in the act that the incredible truth emerged; the cunning creatures had worked out that they could lie on their broad, woolly backs and roll across like commandos.
Sally Coulthard begins with the emergence of the first wild sheep in Asia between ten million and 20 million years ago, and ends with the famous clone Dolly (above)
This tale of unexpected ovine intelligence (sheep’s brains are, it turns out, among the most highly developed in the animal kingdom) is one of dozens deftly assembled by Sally Coulthard in this very readable and rather charming book.
By splicing such domestic anecdotes with politics and economics, she creates a history a good deal more interesting than it may sound to the sheep-indifferent reader.
Beginning with the emergence of the first wild sheep in Asia between ten million and 20 million years ago, and ending with the famous clone Dolly, Coulthard focuses on the impact of sheep, wool and woollen textiles on British society during just the past 2,000 years.
Some of this will be familiar from school history lessons. However, much, such as the embedding of coded messages in knitting by wartime spies, is surprising, and the detail drives home the extent of the influence of sheep on our landscape and history.
‘I thank God and ever shall,’ read the inscription on the home of one medieval wool merchant in Newark, ‘it is the sheepe that payed for all.’
Coulthard illustrates the truth of that maxim and raises interesting questions about the roles that sheep may or may not play in the future as farmers grapple with climate change.
A snappy, stimulating book, and certainly not just for shepherds.
Richard Benson