David Gelber
Behind Closed Doors
Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day
By Deborah Cohen
Viking 371pp £20
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. When Philip Larkin launched his broadside against parenthood at the start of the 1970s, the traditional family had already been consigned to the tumbril. During the previous decade, a ragtag cluster of forces, from the psychiatrist R D Laing and the social anthropologist Edmund Leach to the Gay Liberation Front and the nascent feminist movement, had denounced this once-hallowed institution as a cabaret of dysfunctionality, a cradle of repression and a coven of abuse. ‘The initial act of brutality against the average child is the mother’s first kiss,’ wrote Laing, in a typically pugnacious pronouncement. From this seemingly innocuous gesture, every other imaginable form of injury and distress proceeded.
In Family Secrets, the social historian Deborah Cohen seeks to amend this vision of perdition and rescue the family from the modish opprobrium it has suffered since the first dawn of the sexual revolution. The tight helix of intolerance and authoritarianism that Laing and his disciples condemned was, Cohen argues,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk