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“Noel Malcolm slaughters so many herds of sacred cows in an unsentimental, granitic, beautifully assembled mosaic of evidence. He is at odds—not deliberately but simply empirically—with, as he states, the whole consensus on the history of sexuality. He regards homosexuality in its modern form not as having emerged in the late 17th, early 18th century—which apparently, to me very surprisingly, is the established view among historians of sexuality—but instead being a much more constant, though perhaps rather subterranean, current. He identifies and explains geographical differences between the Mediterranean and southern areas of Europe on the one hand, and northern Europe on the other. He never comes to conclusions first and then builds the why and how upon them, he simply assembles all the evidence he can find and proceeds with great care upon its basis. And while that evidence is of course extremely patchy and varied, there is a lot of it, if you are as good at searching as he is. He constructs these huge hecatombs of anecdotes, of deductions from absence, of judicial statistics, of inference, of literary sources, of gossip.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize
Minoo Dinshaw, Biographer
