For People Who Devour Books

Nov 2008

John de St Jorre

Agent Provocateur

John de St Jorre

Chariots of Flesh

The Paris Olympia Press

By Patrick Kearney, Edited by Angus Carroll

Liverpool University Press 400pp £25 order from our bookshop

It’s hard to imagine now but less than fifty years ago books in much of Western Europe and the United States were routinely confiscated and burned. The bonfires of a resistant Victorian morality consumed the written word, just as heretics were burnt in earlier times and drugs would be incinerated later.

Repression fed invention. In Paris, first a father and then his son saw an opportunity and seized it. In the 1930s, Jack Kahane, an Edwardian dandy who had married a Frenchwoman, launched the Obelisk Press. Profiting from censorship in Britain, he published mildly risqué novels, many written by himself, that