'Memoirs of a voluptuary' is one of the books that will confirm foreign prejudice that British Public Schools are hotbeds of homosexual activity. It describes the sexual awakening of the narrator, Charlie Powerscourt, and his friends Bob Rutherford and Jimmy, the Duke of Surrey. The ingenuity of their efforts to achieve sexual release is astonishing, and interwoven with this curious story is some remarkable heterosexual narrative from a sophisticated French friend.
"Memoirs of a Voluptuary" (also entitled "The Secret Life of an English Boarding School") is one of the books that will confirm foreign prejudice that British Public Schools are the hotbeds of homosexual activity. It describes the sexual awakening of the narrator, Charlie Powerscourt, and his friends Bob Rutherford and Jimmy, the Duke of Surrey. The ingenuity of their efforts to achieve sexual release is astonishing, and interwoven with this curious story is some remarkable heterosexual narrative from a sophisticated French friend. "After due consideration, I consider it to be the best erotic story in English, after Fanny Hill." An unexpurgated Wordsworth Classic Erotica edition.
Robert Hughes has trained his critical eye on many major subjects, from the city of Barcelona to the history of his native Australia. Now he turns that eye inward, onto himself and the world that formed him. Hughes analyzes his experiences the way he might examine a Van Gogh or a Picasso. From his relationship with his stern and distant father to his Catholic upbringing and school years; and from his development as an artist, writer, and critic to his growing appreciation of art and his exhilaration at leaving Australia to discover a new life, Hughes’ memoir is an extraordinary feat of exploration and celebration.
A sensational assembly of salacious stories selected from the secret shelves of the libraries of libertines, long-gone gentlemen, rakes and roues. These pages are patinated with the pulsating passion of vigorous youths, willing wenches, innocent initiates, meddling madames and vicarious voyeurs. The passionate participants, the actors and actresses of these romances, the heroes and heroines of these tales all seem to need little encouragement to indulge in their ribald and riotous recreation.Few avenues of amorous adventure and exotic experiment will be left unexplored. Here some great and some prudently anonymous authors inspired by inventive imagination and, probably, personal experience lay out their works of fantasy for your edification.
Bestselling novelist Margaret George brings to life the glittering kingdom of Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, in this lush, sweeping, and richly detailed saga, the basis for the Cleopatra TV mini-series. Told in Cleopatra's own voice, The Memoirs of Cleopatra is a mesmerizing tale of ambition, passion, and betrayal in the ancient Egyptian world, which begins when the twenty-year-old queen seeks out the most powerful man in the world, Julius Caesar, and does not end until, having survived the assassination of Caesar and the defeat of the second man she loves, Marc Antony, she plots her own death rather than be paraded in triumph through the streets of Rome. Most of all, in its richness and authenticity, it is an irresistible story that reveals why Margaret George's work has been widely acclaimed as "the best kind of historical novel, one the reader can't wait to get lost in." (San Francisco Chronicle).
This “wonderfully gripping biography” digs beneath the famous legend to present a nuanced and revealing portrait of a serious-mined monarch (Allan Massie, Wall Street Journal). As the last Queen of France before the French Revolution, Marie-Antoinette was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, while today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. But who was she really? In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds fresh light on her story. Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the monarchy. Drawing on new sources, he describes how she refused to prioritize the aggressive foreign policy of her mother, bravely took over the helm from her faltering husband, and, when revolution broke out, worked closely with repentant radicals to give the constitutional monarchy a fighting chance. For the first time, Hardman demonstrates exactly what influence Marie-Antoinette had and when and how she exerted it. Named a 2020 Book of the Year by The Spectator
Licentious Gotham, set in the streets, news depots, publishing houses, grand jury chambers, and courtrooms of the nation's great metropolis, delves into the stories of the enterprising men and women who created a thriving transcontinental market for sexually arousing books and pictures. The experiences of fancy publishers, flash editors, and racy novelists, who all managed to pursue their trade in the face of laws criminalizing obscene publications, dramatically convey nineteenth-century America's daring notions of sex, gender, and desire, as well as the frequently counterproductive results of attempts to enforce conventional moral standards. In nineteenth-century New York, the business of erotic publishing and legal attacks on obscenity developed in tandem, with each activity shaping and even promoting the pursuit of the other. Obscenity prohibitions, rather than curbing salacious publications, inspired innovative new styles of forbidden literature--such as works highlighting expressions of passion and pleasure by middle-class American women. Obscenity prosecutions also spurred purveyors of lewd materials to devise novel schemes to evade local censorship by advertising and distributing their products through the mail. This subterfuge in turn triggered far-reaching transformations in strategies for policing obscenity. Donna Dennis offers a colorful, groundbreaking account of the birth of an indecent print trade and the origins of obscenity regulation in the United States. By revealing the paradoxes that characterized early efforts to suppress sexual expression in the name of morality, she suggests relevant lessons for our own day.
