Sex
Dangerous romance – Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley
‘The bus company’s yellow tin sign on its concrete post seemed for a long while a forlorn flag announcing nothing,’ notes Stella, the narrator of Tessa Hadley’s new novel Clever… Continue reading
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Heat Lightning by Helen Hull – review
‘I had decided that I wished to write a novel about the immediate present – this was the summer of 1930 – and I had been speculating about the way… Continue reading
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Falling out of love, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 – discovering poetry
How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December’s bareness everywhere!… Continue reading
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The true romantic
Schmaltz just doesn’t sit well with traditional English sensibilities. We spend hundreds of millions of pounds on Valentine’s Day each year whilst acknowledging that it’s a load of commercial tosh.… Continue reading
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When will all this stop?
In a dawn raid today police swooped on children’s legend This Old Man for alleged sexual assault against countless toddlers and took him to a police station. “We have several… Continue reading
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Bad Sex Award
Loins are girded and members tumescent, for next Tuesday sees the presentation of this year’s Bad Sex Award. The Literary Review’s annual prize for the worst description of sex in… Continue reading
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Sharon Olds’ fear and self-loathing
Since the publication of her debut collection, Satan Says in 1980, which was awarded the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award, Sharon Olds has become a prominent – and controversial… Continue reading
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My BBC sex hell
For years I have kept this to myself; a damaged individual, bottling it all up inside. But now that others have spoken out I’ve found an inner strength, a sort… Continue reading
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What makes a man
The Roman orator Quintilian offered some practical advice to the budding politician: don’t move too languidly, flick your fingers, or tilt your neck in a feminine way if you want… Continue reading
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The shock value of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester
‘The Maidenhead’ Have you not in a chimney seen A sullen faggot wet and green, How coyly it receives the heat, And at both ends does fume and sweat? So… Continue reading
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Unmastered: A book on desire, most difficult to tell (…or read)
Among the new words which entered the English Dictionary last year was ‘overshare’, def: ‘to reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life’. If that detail pertains to… Continue reading
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‘Story of O’ and the Oral Tradition
A fascinating case was recently brought before the Italian courts. After six years of conjugal submission to her padrone (far better than master, give it that) a woman has filed… Continue reading
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Review: Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson
Winning the Booker can do strange things. For one, critics tend to become noticeably shyer around authors with some bling in their trophy cabinets, hyperbole blunting their edge. But if… Continue reading
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished business
It’s hard enough convincing people to read finished novels much less unfinished ones — though perhaps our cultural obsession with The Great Gatsby is reason enough to republish F. Scott… Continue reading
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The language of patronage
Somehow, sex is less appealing when it’s characterised as ‘equitable return’. Though I’ve heard the phrase used in a similar context a dozen times since, I wasn’t quite sure what… Continue reading
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Naomi Wolf, Marie Stopes and grand deceit
‘This man makes a pseudonym and crawls behind it like a worm,’ wrote Sylvia Plath in The Fearful. The weekend’s literary pages were gripped by a story of pseudonyms. R.J.… Continue reading
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What comes after Fifty Shades?
After the record-breaking success of the Fifty Shades trilogy, publishers are desperately trying to answer the multi-million dollar question, what comes next? What will all those millions of readers who… Continue reading
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Rereading Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal was famously waspish or infamously nasty, depending on your point of view. Most outspoken (and successful) writers divide opinion, but Vidal does so more than most. His distinctive… Continue reading
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Smut Samizdat
Thanks to Twitter for alerting me to this small act of rebellion: Taken outside the display windows at Smiths, @HypnoPeter As Fleur Macdonald wrote a couple of weeks ago, it… Continue reading
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Porn season
EL James has a lot to answer for. Yesterday brought news that a British publishing house, Total-E-Bound Publishing, will sex-up some of the classics in the hope of cashing in… Continue reading
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