Statutory Warning: This is a Book

It was revealed last week that the University of the Highlands and Islands - yes, a real univ in Inverness, Scotland - warned its students of a text in their syllabus containing... wait for it... 'graphic fishing scenes'. 'Guilty as charged,' the book's author would have said, only if Ernest Hemingway was alive. But his 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea, deals with an ageing Cuban fisherman who catches an 18 ft marlin and then has to kill it - along with some sharks that had planned to feed on the marlin's corpse. On the bright side, this involves only a 'content warning' purportedly for students to make 'informed choices', rather than an outright ban, as was the case with a school in Tennessee in the US where copies of Art Spiegelman's classic 1991 graphic novel on the Holocaust, Maus, were removed from the library.

Yes, there's a lot of bad things in the best of books - bloodshed and disrobing in the Mahabharat; bloodshed, xenophobia and underage sex in Shakespeare's plays; bloodshed and tuberculosis in Charles Dickens, not to mention drug use in Sherlock Holmes. If one really looks at it, every book worth studying (never mind enjoying) has its fair share of things the woke-folk - whether hypersensitive parents or their swoony brats - will scream and collapse over. So, it's best to stop reading and stay ignorant.