Leo Abse has done it again. At eighty-three, the Freudian ex-MP to whom we owe the reform of the laws relating to divorce, homosexuality, suicide and children’s rights has produced a book that is brilliant, disturbing and entertaining, at times bewildering, but always stimulating. His opening is characteristically provocative, informing us in detail of how, ‘as a callow provincial youth of seventeen’, he was ‘for the first time proffered a blow job’. But the purpose of the book – a volume of essays on a common theme – is perfectly serious.

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