I really, really wanted Jane Eyre to be eaten by wolves.

I got a copy of Spycatcher from abroad when it was banned.

I also have some back alley press editions of Trotsky and Lenin that I found in a box at a car boot sale, along with something called the KGB training manual. Weird.

Crime and Punishment

A superbly written book, which is exactly the problem. The awfulness is what happens to the victims - their murder. I found it so upsetting, because it was described so well.

I will finish it one day. But not yet. I was recently bereaved and can’t take it at the moment.

I find the imposition of another person’s moral system to be very annoying in classic literature. For instance, many older book copies remove spicier language used in earlier times. So many copies of Pepys remove the word turds from the description of his neighbours sewage overflowing into his cellar. You can’t take the turds out of the seventeenth century without losing a great deal of the atmosphere! Likewise the syphilitic whores and the mercury treatments to cure it which are part of any good Boswell journal.

To some extent, it’s the editors and publishers not the authors who impose moral standards.

They’re scared of public condemnation. Free speech in literature should be enshrined in law. After all, people don’t have to read it. Personally, I dislike anything bigoted and that abuses religious, sexual or gender groups. But I fully support your right to read about Pepys shite or Boswell’s whores.

I’m happy with cheap reading copies. I was brought up browsing through second hand stores and I have some reading copies that may well be Victorian, like Thackeray and Dickens.

I do collect certain books and I came across an early copy of Robert Burns that had been signed by a previous owner- who was my 3 great’s grandfather! I paid a couple of hundred pounds for it!

The pillow book of Sei Shonagon