Frances Wilson
Licence For Roving Hands
Woman as Design: Before Behind Between Above Below
By Stephen Bayley
Conran Octopus 336pp £50 order from our bookshop
This is a coffee-table book for one of those coffee tables designed by the Sixties pop artist Allen Jones, in which a full-size prosthetic female on all fours, kitted out in a leather fetish kit consisting of a black corset, yellow hot pants, black lace-up boots and long black gloves, her pendulous breasts exposed and dangling, sports a sheet of glass along her back. A double-page spread of the image can be found on pages 30–31 of Woman as Design, Stephen Bayley’s excursion into the wonders of tits and arse from Aphrodite to Pamela Anderson.
God created woman, and man helped him along a bit. The female body, argues Bayley – writer, columnist, and design guru – is a masterpiece of design, ‘an eternal natural classic as well as an inexhaustible sourcebook of inspirational form and detail’. The idea for bringing out a
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
'Catastrophe' as a category 'is too large and miscellaneous ... if there is a "correct" response to an earthquake, it is unlikely to have much in common with the "correct" response to an epidemic'.
Jonathan Sumption on Niall Ferguson's 'Doom'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/prime-minister-versus-pathogen
'He has been arrested in the past and upon his release, he has cheerfully persisted in his activism. His courage is exemplary.’
@lucyjpop investigates Zargana, the renowned Burmese satirist recently arrested as part of a widespread military crackdown.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/zargana-2
A new biography of the archaeologist and explorer Charles Masson provides a 'tale of intrigue, espionage, blackmail, disguise, rebellion, treasure and the discovery of lost civilisations', says @BijanOmrani.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/our-man-in-kabul