Even where freedom of speech and conscience are not curtailed by law, there is another kind of censorship that is just as destructive to progress.

Abusive language, straw-man arguments and downright ‘fake news’ should have no place in civilised debate, but censoring them is far worse.

Amid the Don Pacifico Affair, William Gladstone told Lord Palmerston that pride in his own country did not excuse bossing others about like a global schoolmaster.

To Napoleon, the way that politicians in Paris had forced metric measurements on the public was a lesson in bad government.

The great French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte protested that in calling England ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ he had paid us a compliment.

After a visit to England in 1847, Aleksey Khomyakov published his impressions of our country and our people in a Moscow magazine.