K Biswas

Witchhunt.com

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

By

Picador 277pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Is Shame Necessary?: New Uses for an Old Tool

By

Allen Lane 209pp £17.99 order from our bookshop

‘I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.’ These lines from Othello were recalled by Max Mosley, the head of motor racing’s governing body, as he stared at his Sunday newspaper on 30 March 2008: ‘F1 Boss Has Sick Nazi Orgy With 5 Hookers. EXCLUSIVE: Son of fascist Hitler lover in sex shame’. Adorned with clandestine video stills, the story, penned by News of the World reporter Neville Thurlbeck, sought to shame Mosley by fusing his penchant for sadomasochistic sex with the racist politics of his father, Oswald: ‘His Jew-hating father … would have been proud of his warped son’s command of German as he struts around looking for bottoms to whack.’

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    • 'Readers have no more power to predict where the next story is going to take them than the prisoners had to determi… ,
    • 'Ho was no Soviet or Chinese puppet. He was a nationalist first and foremost. Had the Americans just realised this.… ,
    Follow Us