The death of Desmond Morris last month sent me down a rabbit hole I had not expected: Malta in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a small island that had somehow attracted a cluster of internationally significant writers, and was doing its best to make their books disappear.

Morris had moved to Malta in 1968, flush from the extraordinary success of The Naked Ape, which had sold millions of copies and landed on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books alongside Balzac and Voltaire. He accepted the ban as flattery. The Maltese state, operating its own censorship regime, one that was arbitrary rather than systematic but no less effective for that, ensured that no copy of the book could legally enter the island where its author was now living.

Anthony Burgess was also living in Malta at the time. He had his own grievances. When his possessions arrived on the island in 1969, Customs officers seized 47 books from his personal library on suspicion of indecency. Forty-three were incinerated under police escort. Four were eventually returned after he appealed, including a copy of Kingsley Amis' The Anti-Death League. Angela Carter, D. H. Lawrence and Dennis Wheatley were among those consumed by the flames. Further review copies from the Sunday Times were subsequently confiscated, along with a French translation of his own novel Tremor of Intent. It was, by any measure, a deeply arbitrary exercise of State power. Burgess accepted an invitation from the Censorship Reform Group of the Malta Library Association to deliver a public lecture at the university. He called it Obscenity and the Arts. Before the lecture, he was interviewed by Marie Said (Benoît) in the Sunday Times of Malta, giving his arguments a far wider circulation than the lecture alone would have achieved.

That lecture, delivered on 10 June 1970 to an audience of a thousand people, including priests and government officials, and published as a short-run pamphlet by the Malta Library Association in 1973, is the centrepiece of a small book I recently ordered: Obscenity and the Arts, published by Pariah Press in 2018, which makes the text available to an international readership for the first time. In the spring of 1974, Burgess returned from a visit to Italy to find his house confiscated by the Maltese government. He took the story to the Guardian, where it made the front page. The house was eventually de-confiscated, but his wife Liana had had enough. The family left, eventually settling in Rome.

It is worth pausing on who was doing the censoring, and why. The book burnings of 1969 happened under the Nationalists. The confiscation of Burgess' house in 1974 happened under Mintoff's Labour, a government that had spectacularly fallen out with the Church and built its identity on anti-colonial, anti-British nationalism. Mintoff is one of the more fascinatingly contradictory figures in 20th century European politics: fiercely anticlerical in his confrontations with the hierarchy, yet leading a working-class electorate whose cultural conservatism remained deeply Catholic in its instincts. He could expel the Archbishop and simultaneously preside over a State apparatus that burnt foreign books. Whether that makes him a hypocrite, a pragmatist, or simply a leader trapped between his own secularism and the society he governed is a question Maltese political culture has never fully reckoned with. What is clear is that the instinct to restrict, once embedded in State machinery, tends to outlast the ideologies that originally justified it. Burgess' house was not confiscated in the name of the Church. It was confiscated in the name of the State. The distinction, in practice, made little difference.

The laws against obscene and blasphemous plays were not finally repealed until 2016, under another Labour government. That repeal did not come from nowhere. In 2009, novelist Alex Vella Gera published a short story, Li Tkisser Sewwi, in the left-wing student newspaper Ir-Realtà. The University of Malta rector reported both Vella Gera and the paper's editor, Mark Camilleri, to the police. Both faced criminal charges for distributing obscene material and undermining public morals. The debate that followed centred almost entirely on whether the story constituted art. It was a legitimate question for critics. It was an irrelevant one for the law. Both were acquitted, but the case exposed how live the censorship instinct remained in Malta four decades after Burgess' lecture. I am not immune to this history either. When Il-Manifest tal-Killer was first published, it was forbidden from being lent out by public libraries. Readers could only consume it within the safe walls of the library itself. The logic was the same: the State, or its proxies, deciding what citizens could take home with them. Burgess would have recognised it immediately.

Obscenity and the Arts is more than an archival curiosity. Andrew Biswell's introduction and Germaine Greer's responding essay do the heavier lifting, placing the lecture within both the biography and the broader argument about art and censorship. Greer is characteristically unsparing: she calls Burgess' defence flippant, and she is right. The argument, such as it is, also concedes too much ground. Burgess' central case, that censorship is wrong because serious art cannot by definition be obscene, sounds reasonable until you ask who decides what is serious. At that point you have not defeated the censor. You have simply given him a more refined set of criteria.

The case against censorship does not rest on artistic quality. It rests on something simpler and less negotiable: nobody has the right to decide for other adults what they may read or see. Not the Church. Not the State. The moment you accept that censorship is wrong only when it targets work of merit, you have handed the censor the pen. All they need to do is dispute the merit.

That argument, made in Valletta in 1970, has not aged out of relevance. We are watching artists across Europe and beyond lose platforms, funding and institutional support for speaking about the killing of Palestinians in Gaza. The mechanism is different; the presumption is the same. Someone, somewhere, has decided that certain things should not be said, and has found the administrative means to enforce that decision. Burgess was right to be angry in 1970, even if his lecture did not give that anger the argument it deserved.

This book, slight as it is, is a useful reminder of what that argument needs to be.

Ed. Note: Karl Schembri is a Maltese author, poet and former investigative journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya, where he works as a Regional Media Adviser for the Norwegian Refugee Council. He has reported from conflict zones across the Middle East and Africa, and has appeared as a live spokesperson on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. His published work includes the novels Il-Manifest tal-Killer and Eħlisna mid-Deni, and children's books It-Tifel li Salva d-Dinja and The Journey of Miskit, which is used for therapy with traumatised children in conflict zones. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PEN Malta. He previously worked as a journalist at The Malta Independent.

Marie Benoît comments: The Malta Library Association of which I was a member had asked me to approach Anthony Burgess to give a talk after I told them of my soon-to-be published interview in The Sunday Times of Malta. There was a great deal written about censorship in those days, and justifiably so. One day Burgess called and told me he would like to meet me. After that I was a regular visitor to their home at 168, Main Street, Lija, where he lived with his Italian wife, Liana and their son Paolo Andrea.

PHOTO: Gilbert Calleja