Louis XV’s Council of State decreed death for anyone who stirred up emotions. And why not? After all, Louis the Beloved, France’s second longest-serving monarch, was only doing what past rulers had done — controlling what people wrote, said and heard.

The first officially recorded instance of state censorship is said to be in Rome in the second century BC, when texts citing Pythagorean philosophy were denounced as subversive. A bonfire was prepared by victimarii, slaughterers whose day job was to perform animal sacrifices.

In his captivating sprint through two millennia of censorship, Eric Berkowitz chronicles some of the more bizarre and egregious episodes, while explaining that the human instinct to suppress speech has rarely waned. Indeed, the issue is possibly as fraught now as it has ever been. Habits have not changed; only the technology has. In so doing it has provided unbridled opportunities for the abuse of speech, the whipping up of hatreds and the manipulation of information.