This book had several starting points. One was my longstanding interest in literature's relationship to history and politics: its peculiar forms of reference, and also its impact on its readers, its ways of working on the worlds from which, and into which, it emerged. I read Said's Orientalism in the 1980s when I was first thinking about those questions. I agreed with a lot of what he said and admired his sense of political purpose, but started to wonder whether his uses of literature, and of the techniques of literary criticism, truly fitted together with his discussions of politics – including, fundamentally, speculations on texts’ political and ethical effects. (I was in this territory in Chapter 1.) As I continued reading other critics and theorists, that sense of a mismatch proved not to be unusual. It struck me that certain groups of people who seemed to need a reliable account of how literary texts and films worked in the world did not always have one. Postcolonial critics, linked in this way to other critics with an interest in ideology, were one example I explored; censors were another. It also struck me that critics, like censors, can find themselves in a paradoxical position.