Francis King
Only Connect
Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love
By Sheila Rowbotham
Verso 565pp £24.99 order from our bookshop
Like his near-contemporaries Marie Stopes, Havelock Ellis and the Pankhursts, Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) was one of those characters who changed the society of their times far more effectively than people endowed with infinitely more intellectual, creative or political resources. Although he concerned himself with a bewildering variety of good causes, political movements and fads (animal rights, vegetarianism, the emancipation of women, socialism, nude swimming, clean air, oriental mysticism, recycling of clothes, the wearing of sandals), he should, in my view, be chiefly honoured for the way in which he helped heterosexuals to understand and accept homosexuals and, no less importantly, homosexuals to understand and accept themselves.
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
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings