'Quite simply, this book is a work of genius' Matthew Parris, Spectator
The second in a major two-part anthology uncovering the rich reality of life for queer men in London, from the end of the Second World War to decriminalization in 1967
In the 1940s, it was believed that homosexuality had been becoming more widespread in the aftermath of war. A moral panic ensued, centred around London as the place to which gay men gravitated.
Peter Parker's fascinating new compendium explores what it was actually like for queer men in London in this period, whether they were well-known figures such as Francis Bacon, Joe Orton and Kenneth Williams, or living lives of quiet – or occasionally rowdy – anonymity in pubs, clubs, more public places of assignation, or at home. It is rich with letters, diaries, psychological textbooks, novels, films, plays and police records, covering a wide range of viewpoints, from those who deplored homosexuality to those who campaigned for its decriminalization.
This second volume, from 1960 to 1967, shows how key elements in British society gradually changed their views on homosexuality, resulting in the landmark 1967 act by which it was no longer considered a crime if it took place between adults in private. This did not end violence, discrimination and prejudice, but it at least curbed official persecution. Some Men in London is a testament to queer life and its thriving, joyous subculture – a subculture without which the 1960s would have been immeasurably impoverished.
THE INSTANT NO. 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'Want makes for addictive reading . . . compelling' Guardian
'I just loved reading it. It’s exceptional' Fearne Cotton, Happy Place
'An empowering project' Stylist
'Extremely sexy . . . Want is the horny manifesto your TBR list will thank you for' Cosmopolitan
What do you want when no one is watching?
Who do you fantasise about when the lights are off?
When you think about sex, what do you really want?
When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet so many of us don’t talk about it at all.
In this groundbreaking book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous sexual fantasies of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous submission). They are all extraordinary: full of desire, fear, intimacy, shame, satisfaction and, ultimately, liberation. From dreaming about someone off-limits to conjuring a scene with multiple partners, from sex that is gentle and tender to passionate and playful, from women who have never had sex to women who have had more sex than they can remember, these fantasies provide a window into the most secret part of our minds.
Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally themselves.
Quite simply, this book is a work of genius - Matthew Parris, The Spectator
An essential study of post-war gay London life... one of the best anthologies I have ever read - John Self, The Observer
With it’s wide-ranging selection, generous biographical notes and provocative bibliography, Some Men in London is a serious and important contribution to our understanding of Britain up to today - Fiona Sampson, The Tablet
An absolutely extraordinary book … about actually what life was like for homosexual men in London in the 1940s and the 1950s… It’s amazing - Dominic Sandbrook
The first part of a major new anthology which uncovers the rich reality of life for queer men in London
In the 1940s, it was believed that homosexuality had been becoming more widespread in the aftermath of war. A moral panic ensued, centred around London as the place to which gay men gravitated.
In a major new anthology, Peter Parker explores what it was actually like for queer men in London in this period, whether they were well-known figures such as John Gielgud, ‘Chips’ Channon and E.M. Forster, or living lives of quiet – or occasionally rowdy – anonymity in pubs, clubs, more public places of assignation, or at home. It is rich with letters, diaries, psychological textbooks, novels, films, plays and police records, covering a wide range of viewpoints, from those who deplored homosexuality to those who campaigned for its decriminalisation.
This first volume, from 1945 to 1959, details a community forced to live at constant risk of blackmail or prison. Yet it also shows a thriving and joyous subculture, one that enriched a mainstream culture often ignorant of its debt to gay creators. Some Men In London is a testament to queer life, which was always much more complex than newspapers, governments and the Metropolitan Police Force imagined.
‘A brilliant, glittering intelligence’ Sunday Times
On Women brings together Susan Sontag's most fearless and incisive writing on women, a crucial aspect of her work that has not until now received the attention it deserves
Written during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag's essays remain strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. At times powerfully in sync and at others powerfully at odds with them, they are always characteristically original in their examinations of the 'biological division of labour', the double-standard for ageing and the dynamics of women's power and powerlessness.
As Merve Emre writes in her introduction, On Women offers us 'the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas and the world.'
‘Boldly provocative’ iNews
‘On Women demonstrates a powerful mind and equally forceful personality’ The Herald
'Required reading for everyone who lives in an unruly human body... elegant, fierce, and profound' Roxane Gay
Size discrimination harms everyone. Acclaimed philosopher Kate Manne shows how to combat it.
For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not.
Blending intimate stories with trenchant analysis, Manne shows why fatphobia matters, now more than ever. Over the last decades, bias has waned in every category except one: body size. Here she examines how anti-fatness operates – how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's attractiveness, fortitude and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect and poor educational outcomes. It is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential. Fatphobia is a social justice issue.
In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of ‘body reflexivity’ -- a radical re-evaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.
In the #MeToo age, US debate over licit sex has split into two camps: one insists that consent solves the problem of sexual coercion, while the other equates sexual pleasure with the patriarchal erotics of silence and mystery. Manon Garcia rejects both positions, arguing that consent is a faulty legal threshold but essential to the joy of good sex.
This unflinchingly honest memoir shines new light on the complex intersections of gender identity, sexuality, sex and queerness. Join Harry on his personal journey amongst the fraught and contradictory worlds of contemporary gay culture and re-examine the unique patterns of your own queerness along the way
In April 2019, Liam Konemann idly began work on what he thought of as ‘the appendix’ - a record of ongoing transphobia in the UK that he came across. But when his mental health began to spiral, he turned his attention to a different topic instead: how do we find beauty in transmasculinity? And how do we maintain it in a world stacked against us?
The Appendix explores transphobia in UK media, as well as the trauma of living in a society constantly debating you. Liam explains his time spent ‘stealth’ after moving to the UK, his false belief that witnessing the transphobia by documenting it would lead people to change their behaviours - that if he could only show them the effects on people like him, it would all stop - and the peaks and troughs of anxiety. More so, he turns the focus to the more positive representations and experiences, capturing - as he sought - the beauty in transmasculinity.
A gripping new investigation into the underbelly of digital technology, which reveals not only how costly the virtual world is, but how damaging it is to the environment. If digital technology were a country, it would be the third-highest consumer of electricity behind China and the United States.Every year, streaming technology generates as much greenhouse gas as Spain — close to 1 per cent of global emissions.One Google search uses as much electricity as a lightbulb left on for up to two minutes.
It turns out that the ‘dematerialised’ digital world, essential for communicating, working, and consuming, is much more tangible than we would like to believe. Today, it absorbs 10 per cent of the world’s electricity and represents nearly 4 per cent of the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions. We are struggling to understand these impacts, as they are obscured to us in the mirage of ‘the cloud’. The result of an investigation carried out over two years on four continents, The Dark Cloud reveals the anatomy of a technology that is virtual only in name. Under the guise of limiting the impact of humans on the planet, it is already asserting itself as one of the major environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.
In November 2019, Paul B. Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference. Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado called for a radical transformation of psychoanalytic discourse and practices, denouncing its complicity with the ideology of sexual difference.
The Sunday Times bestselling story of the landmark international judgement that brought an end to Britain's colonial rule in Africa by the author of EAST WEST STREET and THE RATLINE
Men are responsible for all unwanted pregnancies. Why? Ovulation is involuntary. Ejaculation is not. It is also true that...
- Men are 50 times more fertile than women
- Birth control is hard to access, use, and comes with numerous side effects
- Vasectomies are less risky than tubal litigations
Yet, it's women who are expected to do the work of pregnancy prevention. Why must women be responsible for men's bodies, as well as their own?
Rather than endlessly exploring how and why we control women's bodies in the highly polarised anti-abortion and pro-choice 'debate', Ejaculate Responsibly makes a witty and unflinching case for why men must be held accountable for their reproductive choices. There are zero consequences for men who ejaculate irresponsibly. It's time to shift the responsibility - and burden - of pregnancy prevention onto men.
'A gorgeous manifesto' Oprah Daily
'A tactical, full-throated cry for men to step up' Vogue
A scintillating, richly peopled, impeccably researched history of the New York coastal enclave that, over the last century, became an iconic site of queer liberation
Remarkable storytelling and deep reportage: A page-turning account of a brutal urban wildfire, and a sweeping exploration of our rapidly changing relationship with fire
A luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - from the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor.
The Sunday Times bestseller
*Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize*
A New Statesman and Spectator Book of the Year
'This book calls for nothing less than a revolution in the future of food' Kate Raworth
From the bestselling author of Feral, a breathtaking first glimpse of a new future for food and for humanity
Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry.
Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.
Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.
‘Droll, provocative and crammed to busting with startling facts’ Simon Callow, Guardian
In this powerful Sunday Times bestseller Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way – through the history and experiences of its gay population.
In Roman Londinium the city was dotted with lupanaria (‘wolf dens’ or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels) and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure.
Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music and the horror of AIDS.
Today, we live in an era of openness and tolerance and Queer London has become part of the new norm. Ackroyd tells us the hidden story of how it got there, celebrating its diversity, thrills and energy on the one hand; but reminding us of its very real terrors, dangers and risks on the other.
