Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe said that books had helped her during her imprisonment in Iran

Among the most poignant lines of English poetry is the admonition of the cavalier Richard Love-lace, while incarcerated in 1642, to his beloved Althea: “Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage…” No one knows who Althea was but the sentiment speaks across ages. Arbitrary authority and despotic governments can deprive innocent people of liberty but are unable to suppress the human imagination.

At last night’s ceremony for the Booker Prize, won this year by the Irish novelist Paul Lynch, the audience heard moving testimony from one such brave soul to the power of the written word to give succour.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was imprisoned for nearly six years in Iran on bogus charges of espionage. She related how books