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Podcast: Trinity Long Room Hub Podcasts
Episode: TLRH | ‘Burning the Books’, Series Finale of the Out of the Ashes series
Description: 25th May 2021
An online lecture by Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian, University of Oxford, and author of Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (John Murray Press).
Richard Ovenden's lecture will discuss the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the United Kingdom’s Windrush generation. He will examine both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He will also look at attempts to prevent and mitigate...