If you, like me, have never come across the word ‘libricide’, a quick Google search will tell you that it is, in fact, not the killing of librarians (which, FYI, is still very much homicide, however much you may resent paying those overdue fines). Instead, ‘libricide’ is the burning of books; the rapid oxidation of paper, ink and glue in the exothermic chemical process of combustion (I am told these are the correct terms, being but a lowly arts student myself).

Burning books has a long history. As far back as 213 BC, the first emperor of China, Shih Huang Ti, ordered the burning of every history book created outside of his own State, Qin. In 1242, King Louis IX called for the incineration of all 12,000 copies of the Jewish Talmud in Paris. And, across the Channel, 1526 saw 6,000 copies of William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament burned on the Bishop of London’s word. Probably the most famous instance of book burning, however, took place in Hitler’s Germany: on 10 May 1933, as part of an attempt to synchronise German culture with Nazi ideology (a campaign oh-so-euphemistically called ‘Action against the Un-German Spirit’), over 20,000 books, including those by Goethe, Freud and Einstein, were ceremonially thrown onto flaming pyres up and down the country.

This is, of course, far from an exhaustive list — book burning crops up in history far too often for me to give anything near a comprehensive account — but it gives a flavour of the historical, geographical and cultural diversity of the practice. Despite this, however, it does all seem rather far removed from our comfortable Cambridge bubble – the stuff of another age, another country, another political system.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, this is not so. In 2007, Cambridge University Press took up the torch for book burning when it decided to destroy all remaining copies of the book Alms for Jihad, by Burr and Collins, as part of a legal settlement with Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz. While it was a flame-free destruction (we assume), US Congressman Frank R. Wolf described it as "basically a book burning" and the publishers came under fire for their apparent disregard for freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

So what is so wrong with burning books? The thing is that, as is so often the case, the whole of the act is far greater than the sum of its parts. It isn't just about setting fire to a pile of paper, ink and glue — this would be tantamount to burning down a stationary cupboard, or perhaps W.H Smith, an act that somewhat lacks the same symbolic resonance. Instead, book burning is about censorship, the stifling of creativity, the suffocation of freedom. It's about a regime – or, indeed, an individual – stating its power in an extravagant and intimidating way. Book burnings are, after all, rarely private affairs. They're done with an audience, in front of the people for whom their unmistakeable threat is intended. They're done with a fanfare, like a twisted celebration of all things tyrannical. They are indisputable acts of aggression and, as Heinrich Heine once said, "where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings’.

The stick in the mud here, however, is that libricide invariably achieves the opposite: while its culprits may see burning books as an act of dominance, it is actually, paradoxically, one of empowerment and, by showing how much they fear literature, an affirmation of its status as a symbol of counter-culture and the revolutionary’s weapon of choice. For every book burned over time, another dissatisfied citizen has come to see literature as a means of expressing their disaffection and sticking a proverbial two fingers up to the status quo. It's like when a child unknowingly picks up a swear word: tell them it’s bad and they'll simply say it louder. On this basis then, perhaps we might amend Heine’s quote a little: where they have burned books, they will end in challenging human beings to bloody well keep on writing them anyway.