Frances Wilson
Fatal Hat-traction
Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire
By Carol Dyhouse
Oxford University Press 262pp £20 order from our bookshop
What do women want? Freud’s great conundrum, the unsolved riddle of a lifetime’s thought, continues to confound men and divide women. According to the Spice Girls, what we really really want is to zigazig ah, but for E L James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey, all we want is a man who does the washing-up. In Heartthrobs, Carol Dyhouse, professor emeritus of history at Sussex University, ‘narrows the question down’, as she puts it, to ‘what women have found irresistibly attractive in men’, which is something else entirely. Knowing what you want on a philosophical level and knowing what you like in a chap are two different things.
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
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad