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Your support makes all the difference.Misogynies by Joan Smith, Faber pounds 12.99. Cogent, witty, devastating examination of that nasty little habit of woman-hating buried deep in our culture, here reissued with two new essays. Princess Di, Marilyn Monroe, Mrs T, Judge Clarence Thomas, the Yorkshire Ripper, movies and the media - all are invoked to show how women are routinely denigrated and despised. Never hysterical or psycho-babbling, Smith lets her subjects damn themselves: the quotes from the hugely admired Czech novelist Milan Kundera should make all decent chaps blush with collective shame. Fat chance.
The Ruins of Time by Ben Woolfenden, Black Swan pounds 4.99. Noteworthy debut (a paperback original) in which a father and son fanatically try to discover their genealogy. The pleasure lies in superior story-telling and curious spotlights on history: seedy 1930s Manchester; a Victorian artists' colony of plein air painters in Cornwall; the random annihilation of two world wars as seen through freak casualties away from the battlefields. Woolfenden has a Dickensian bent, (workhouses, pompous clergymen, idealised mothers) but the melodrama is kept to those eras where we expect it, and the intrigue is resolved with terrific aplomb.
Men in Love by Nancy Friday, Hutchinson pounds 9.99. 500 pages of salivating male sexual fantasy as confessed to the intrepid, truth-seeking author, interspersed with cosy, Cosmo-style pseudo-analysis. 'I then attach a pair of moderate-strength nipple clamps . . .they hurt just enough to give pleasure' - a scenario that Friday thinks illustrates 'men's ultimate love/rage polarization'. So that's what it's called.
A Venetian Theory of Heaven by William Riviere, Sceptre pounds 5.99. Amadea Lezze, disillusioned with her decent husband, captivates an impressionable friend. The marriage breakdown is witnessed by cousin Francesca, whose tale of emotional growth the novel becomes. Rich in Venetian detail and water-lore, with a philosophical undertow, this novel is as pleasurable as cruising the canals.
Children of the Sun by Martin Green, Pimlico pounds 10. Brilliant study of the dandies, decadents and Sonnenkinder who dominated much of English cultural life after 1918. Reacting against their manly Edwardian fathers, with Harold Acton and Brian Howard as their figureheads, the bright young things shunned the vulgar hordes and treated life as an absurd game, though one that only nobs can play. Not even the combined efforts of Leavis, Orwell and the Larkin-Amis generation have quite extinguished their kind.
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