It’s hard to imagine now but less than fifty years ago books in much of Western Europe and the United States were routinely confiscated and burned. The bonfires of a resistant Victorian morality consumed the written word, just as heretics were burnt in earlier times and drugs would be incinerated later.

Repression fed invention. In Paris, first a father and then his son saw an opportunity and seized it. In the 1930s, Jack Kahane, an Edwardian dandy who had married a Frenchwoman, launched the Obelisk Press. Profiting from censorship in Britain, he published mildly risqué novels, many written by himself, that