MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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‘There is such a thing as ineradicable homosexuality’, Harry Whyte, letter to Stalin, 1934
MATTHEW HAWKINS treads warily through the symphonic history of a subject that our present understanding can only obscure
Detail from The Last Judgement, Michelangelo, 1541, from the upper righthand corner showing male couples embracing as they ascend to heaven
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, 1400 - 1750
Noel Malcolm
OUP, £25
THE lauded historian Noel Malcolm begins Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by relating an account of how, in 1558, in the household of the Venetian embassy in Istanbul, two young male pages were repeatedly seen flirting and kissing. Other downstairs workers didn’t actually seem to mind, and some were diverted and amused. Those in charge were concerned enough to document and suppress the blandishment, as they didn’t want the household to be seen as resembling local Muslim equivalents, where convention condoned acts of sodomy – or was this just a smear?
Disquisition follows on a grand symphonic scale and the reader is launched into myriad calibrated thoughts. Why are men so strange? Where does recreation end and denigration begin? Is it illuminating or alienating to peer at carnality through a prism of historical and cultural shifts?
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