Books by Noel Malcolm
“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
Interviews where books by Noel Malcolm were recommended
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1
Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy
by Mark Gilbert -
2
Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World
by Kathryn Hughes -
3
The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
by Lucy Hughes-Hallett -
4
Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750
by Noel Malcolm -
5
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin
by Sue Prideaux -
6
Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion
by Michael Taylor
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize, recommended by Minoo Dinshaw
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize, recommended by Minoo Dinshaw
It’s a nonfiction book prize that values “style, rigour, argument, meatiness, readability, freshness, oddity and individuality,” says Minoo Dinshaw, author of Friends in Youth and one of this year’s judges. He introduces the six brilliant books that made the shortlist of this year’s Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize, from the history of post-World War II Italy to the disputes caused by the discovery of dinosaur fossils.
