Jeremy Reed
Heroic Marquis
The Gothic Tales of the Marquis de Sade
By Marquis de Sade (Translated by Margaret Crosland)
Peter Owen 183pp £12.95 order from our bookshop
Maligned, misconstrued and I suspect, little read, the Marquis de Sade remains not only one of the great moralists of the eighteenth century, but also the prototypical exponent of sexual psychology. Outraged by nothing, he continues to shock by virtue of his courage, and his preoccupation with fetish, obsession, the diversity of sexual expression, has in this century found powerful advocates in the likes of Apollinaire, Mario Praz, Man Ray, Georges Bataille and Simone de Beauvoir.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.