“All these book collections . . . had one thing in common: they were gradually disappearing. Their pages were being glued together by damp and mildew. Pull any book from a shelf in Burma and it will be followed by a sprinking of powder-like dust, the work of white ants relentlessly munching their way through thousands of texts all around the country.”

—Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.