BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Emanuel Swedenborg [Graphic Novel] (1982) Christopher Hasler/John Kaczmarczyk The Hell-Fire Friars:Sex Politics and Religion (2002) Gerald Suster   The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (2003) Ian McCalman  The Hellfire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (2008) Evelyn Lord   A vailable at a ridiculously low price from the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, a graphic novelisation of the life of Emanuel Swedenborg by Hasler and Kaczmarczyk provides a simple and accessible introduction to one of the geniuses of early Modern Europe. He is as important in his way as Da Vinci or Paracelsus, someone struggling to make sense of the world he had been born into and coming up with radical new ways of perceiving it within the frameworks of belief that everyone else around him would have taken for granted. Such people do not shift paradigms but they make a stab at making existing paradigms work and, in doing so, they open the door to new and creative ways of seeing the world far int

The World of Sex (1940)  Henry Miller   Men's Adventure Magazines in Post-War America: The Rich Oberg Collection (2004) Taschen Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film (2005) Jimmy McDonough   Miscellany of Sex (2007) Francesca Twinn   Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond, Soho's Billionaire King of Burlesque (2010) Paul Willetts     Henry Miller wrote the original draft of his long essay The World of Sex in 1940 when he was about to turn 50, somewhat of a turning point for any redblooded male, but the text was substantially revised for a secondary publication in 1957 when he was nearing 70. This is a relevant set of facts. This is not a male view of sex so much as that of a highly sexualised male past his powers and frustrated at a world that had always failed to accept him publicly for what he was. He would not have been alone in that frustration - America 're-moralised' itself in the wake of the Great Depressi

The Undergrowth of Literature (1967)   Gillian Freeman with an introduction by the psychiatrist David Stafford-Clark   Sex And Spirit: Ecstasy, Ritual And Taboo (1996) Clifford Bishop   Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (2006) Hugh B. Urban   Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006) Esther Perel     The Undergrowth of Literature is an intriguing bit of history, both because it was written in the mid-1960s when sexual liberty was under discussion openly for the first time in decades and because of the subject matter - the types of pornographic literature available at the time. The inclusion of women's magazines from a feminist perspective and Marvel Comics from a fetishistic perspective make it a true curiousity. It is not a great book. It is of its time. But it is useful to read because it shows how much we have changed since 1967. Intellectuals cannot now be quite so po-faced