Book Reviews

‘How we perceive the past, what we see in it and what we ignore, depends on our current perspective’, writes Faramerz Dabhoiwala at the end of his hotly-anticipated The Origins of Sex. Well, quite. In seeking words to describe Dabhoiwala’s history of sex, though, none could be more appropriate. The book resounds with sundry modern truths, so much so, in fact, that when Dr. Dabhoiwala finally poses the question, ‘How far, then, have we come?’ The answer, ‘Not very, sir, since 1800’, springs to mind. In tandem with the explosion of popular publications, mass circulation of literature, and most importantly the emergence in force of the factual biography from around

Here’s one quote by Charles Dickens that I bet you haven’t read this week. As far as the male sex was concerned, he told a foreign visitor in 1848, promiscuity ‘is so much the rule in England that if any son of his were particularly chaste, he should be alarmed on his account, as if he could not be in good health’. Twenty-first century parents doubtless would put it slightly differently, but we probably all agree that what consenting adults get up to in their bedrooms is their own business. That is a very recent idea. The presumption that sex was a private matter was born in the eighteenth century.

The era immediately preceding the French Revolution presents such rich pickings for the historical novelist that the relative scarcity of English-language fiction set in the period comes as a surprise. We might charitably suggest that our authors are intimidated by the long shadow of A Tale of Two Cities, or less generously remark that they are too busy picking the corpses of the first world war to attend to an earlier conflict with altogether more ambiguous historical overtones. Andrew Miller’s Pure strides with admirable self-assurance into the pyretic atmosphere of Paris in 1785. We meet our hero in the Palace of Versailles, an ambitious young man supplicating himself to the

I’ve spotted a subtle side-effect of the fact that e-Books don’t actually exist. The ‘not being able to lend a book to your husband/friend/etc when you’ve finished it’ problem is well-known. But less obvious is the fact that when you read a book on a Kindle or an iPad, you can’t accidentally leave things between the pages for subsequent owners to find. Because, of course, there won’t be any subsequent owners. One of the joys of a secondhand book is unexpectedly chancing upon someone’s makeshift bookmark trapped between pages 118 and 119. A friend recently gave me, as a present, a copy of More Manners for Men, one of those

I have never been more chilled, thrilled, shocked and excited — and from a literary point of view, nothing has made me feel more inadequate as a writer — than when reading the opening to Great Expectations, which is one of the finest passages I’ve ever come across. Screen adaptations can’t quite capture the atmosphere because the writing frees the imagination; it’s terribly difficult to do, and you often lose the beauty of the words. That is the passage for me. Saul David is a military historian of Victorian Britain The entrance of Magwitch Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the

There is one scene that I remember reading, and it often crops up in my mind despite never having gone back to it. There is a character in Bleak House called Mr Vholes. And there is a description of him removing his gloves as if they were a layer of skin. It’s such a brilliant image of meanness, so suggestive of negative traits. Sinister, too. It has always stuck with me. Mr. Vholes and Richard Carstone return to the former’s Chambers Mr. Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if he were skinning his hands, lifts off