Jail bird books...

'You could be jailed for reading'. So says 'The Independent', who has collated a list of books that to read could have been a punishable offence.

• 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' by D.H. Lawrence - banned for obscenity in 1928 due to explicit nature of language and frank portrayal of sex
• 'Naked Lunch' by William S. Burroughs - banned for obscenity in 1962 due to incidents of child murder and paedophilia
• 'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury - ironically a novel about the banning of books, the work published in 1953 is said to contain hints of McCarthyism
• 'Lolita' by Vladimir Nabokov - the Home Office instructed British Customs officers to seize all copies of the novel in 1955, due to the narrator's inappropriate relationship with a 12 year old girl
• 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert - banned, then acquitted for 'offences against public morals' in 1857, Flaubert justified it only through the eventual death of his protagonist
• 'The Prince' by Niccolo Machiavelli - originally written in 1513, it was banned by the Pope in 1559 for promoting anti-Christian beliefs
• '120 Days of Sodom' by Marquis de Sade - frequently banned for depicitions of orgies and male licentiousness, the 1785 novel was of the typical Sade mould
• 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell - its highly negative portrayal of Communism led the book to being banned in the Soviet Union in 1950 by the Stalin dictatorship

On this day...

French writer and revolutionary, Donatien Alphonse François,Marquis de Sade, died in 1814 at the age of 74. Born into an aristocratic family, the Sades claimed to be the oldest Frank-descended nobility, and so the men alternated between using the titles 'Count' and 'Marquis'; however subsequent generations have refused to use 'Marquis' so as deny association with Donatien. Influenced by Voltaire, Sade philosophised on freedom of speech, yet took the measure to the extreme, advocating liberty to the detrement of religion, morality and law. Involved in numerous scandals, including poisoning and sodomy, Sade spent 32 years of his life occupying either prisions or insane asylums, including ten in the Bastille. Consequently many of his works were written in confinment, and indeed many feature themes which go against institutions of the day; a reoccuring motif being blasphemy against the Catholic Church. Sade's works gave rise to 'sadism' entering the language as a derivative of his name, and this is epitomised no more so than in his best known work, 'The School of Licentiousness'.