There's nothing like a ban to give a book a good reputation. The struggle between free thought and government is an endless one, but when someone bans a book, the book has won. Who did not yearn to read Lady Chatterley's Lover in order to see what the fuss was about? Who, now, knowing what the fuss is about, reads the book unless they are studying DH Lawrence? Solzhenitsyn, on being banned in the Soviet Union, achieved an almost unimaginable moral stature - certainly inconceivable in today's Russia.

My favourite book – I'm afraid it sounds both corny and pretentious to say this, but it has to be said – is Ulysses. It's my favourite book not because it was banned but because it's got everything in it. And that, I suppose, is why it was banned. Objections centred on its earthy elelements: Bloom has a poo. He masturbates at the sight of a young girl looking at fireworks. His wife reminisces lubriciously. But plenty of other things happen, too.

The non-taboo elements of the book outnumber the saucy one so vastly that only a moral cretin, and a very poor reader, could have assumed that the book's intention was to deprave or corrupt. We are approaching the level of the apartheid-era South African government banning Black Beauty, although I would like to see chapter and verse on that before reporting it as more than rumour. Then again, there are enough lunacies taking place at a local level in the United States (usually schools) – restrictions on Twelfth Night, Silas Marner, and Gone With the Wind – to keep us just as entertained.

Depending on whether the work being taken off the shelves is political or sexual in nature, the censor is either a coward or a pervert. I would prefer a world in which books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Did Six Million Really Die? did not exist, but banning them would show that we were scared of them. As for the distribution of carnal texts and pictures – well, that battle's over, thanks to the internet.

But at least when books were being banned it showed someone was taking them seriously – even if they were looking at them upside-down, or through the wrong end of a telescope. The worst thing that can happen to a book is complete indifference.