The complete story, told for the first time using secret government files of the attempts to control what we read. The trouble begins in Victorian England with the Obscene Publications Act. Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, D H Lawrence (the police went for him in a big way, not just Lady Chatterley but his poetry and paintings too), Henry Miller and many others. All were banned. The post office opened packages coming from abroad, the Customs and Excise raided publishers, booksellers and printers and the Vice Squad clumsily went for Cape, Penguin and other publishers. All to suppress books freely available in the rest of the world. The idiocies of successive Home Secretaries are laid bare and Alan Travis shows how things changed in the 1960s with the end of theatre censorship and a new laws. But now it is all changing again with censorship on the internet and videos, particularly from the threat of paedophilia, extreme violence and racist hate speak.