How The Light Gets In

VIDEOS AT IATV. There are several videos of discussions I chaired or took part in at the How The Light Gets In festival. From 2013, there is The Prejudice of Intellectuals: Beauty, intellect, and power with Catherine Hakim, Hannah Dawson and Jim Crace. Also Is Religion Dangerous? with Nicholas Humphrey, Richard Harries and Rupert Sheldrake, with Shahidha Bari hosting. All my as speaker videos are here and as chair ones here.

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Bibliocide

No civilised person is supposed to make bonfires of books. ‘Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings,’ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine in the century before Nazism. Burning books is a sacrilegious act, and the taboo against it particularly binds writers. So what was I doing in a Somerset field lighting a match under the 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica?

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