The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Sebastian, Four Mothers, Restless, and The Most Precious of Cargoes
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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
desire
JOHN GREEN explores the argument that psychiatry needs to move away from the idea of just seeing and treating the individual
SYLVIA HIKINS applauds a polemic against “cleanfluencers” and considers radical alternatives to current inequalities of housework
RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
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DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
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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