The burning of the British Library

There is no truth in books, the Chairman said today. This evening they are burning the contents of the Britsh Library. The pictures are on every TV screen all over London. Security guards throwing Wordsworth onto the flames. Memory is an obstacle to progress says the Chairman. I cannot believe they would go this far. Isis managed to save a couple of the rare books, before the fire started. Each of us has something to look after. I am now the proud guardian of a Shakespeare First Folio, wrapped in a plastic bag. The whole of English history and literature is going up in smoke. Maya wept when we met for tea.
Paulus Orosius admitted in the sixth book of his History against the pagans:
“ Today there exist in temples book chests which we ourselves have seen, and, when these temples were plundered, these, we are told, were emptied by our own men in our time, which, indeed, is a true statement. ”
Ammianus Marcellinus, writing around AD 378 seems to speak of the library in the Serapeum temple as a thing of the past, and he states that many of the Serapeum library's volumes were burnt when Caesar sacked Alexandria.
“ Besides this there are many lofty temples, and especially one to Serapis, which, although no words can adequately describe it, we may yet say, from its splendid halls supported by pillars, and its beautiful statues and other embellishments, is so superbly decorated, that next to the Capitol, of which the ever-venerable Rome boasts, the whole world has nothing worthier of admiration. In it were libraries of inestimable value; and the concurrent testimony of ancient records affirm that 70,000 volumes, which had been collected by the anxious care of the Ptolemies, were burnt in the Alexandrian war when the city was sacked in the time of Caesar the Dictator. ”
We are entering a new dark age.