"The Secret History of the Hell-Fire Clubs" by Geoffrey Ashe

This is a hugely comprehensive history of the tradition of immoral dissent in post-mediaeval western society from Rabelais to Charles Manson, taking in the hell-fire clubs, the Marquis de Sade and Aleister Crowley on the way. I think it has little pretence to be scholarly, it never questions its sources and it repeats stories that other authorities regard as made-up. Even in what is quite a long book, such a massive breadth means it is a little difficult to have much depth. But as an introduction to the subject it is well-written and easy to read and I learned a number of things I hadn’t known before (including all of the stuff about Rabelais - the author was clearly very well read and has prompted me to add yet more books to my tbr pile).

His thesis is fundamentally that the Hell-Fire clubs first thrived in the atmosphere of optimism during the Enlightenment following the middle ages and that they were given an essential impetus because of the number of bored young men, rich and aristocratic, who, during the long Whig ascendancy under Walpole in George II's England, had no outlet for their energies, the Tory party of the time being disorganised and tainted with Jacobite sympathies, “they dwindled into a mere scattered grumble, with a literary tinge”. (Ch 3)

He very much makes the point that all the idealistic societies proposed in which a group of people could dispense with normal morality depends on (a) them being part of a select elite, both rich and good-looking and (b) on them being served by others:

• “Anti-moralists tend to believe in privilege and selection.” (Ch 1)
• “magic tended to be an affair of elite groups with elite ethics . . . or nonethics.”
• “Unbridled freedom could work only inside a select club. When the random myriads began doing as they willed, or as they pleased, they required curbing. Universal, benign, liberating Nature was not to be trusted.” (Ch 11)

Having said that, the appeal is obvious, and repeated time and again:

• “Is it so absurd to suggest that the secret of freedom and fulfillment is to be free and fulfilled?” (Prologue)
• “Everybody should accept Nature’s guidance, say “yes” to life, and try all things, good-humoredly, uninhibitedly” (Ch 1)
• “if Nature was benign and the rational way to live was to obey her ... then why not be wicked, if that ... was how Nature prompted you to assert your freedom, what right had the sourpuss of Respectability to complain?” (Ch 3)
• “What lunacy to believe that God has created us to act in ways which go against Nature, and make us miserable in this world! That he wants us to deny ourselves everything which satisfies the senses and appetites he has given us!” (Ch 5)
• “Nature dictates sexual enjoyment, but she does not dictate “normal” sexual mores, and outside western Europe hardly anyone pretends that she does.” (Ch 13)
• “Anybody not blinded by Christian or post-Christian prejudice must admit that Nature wouldn’t allow men to enjoy (for example) sodomy if such conduct offended her.” (Ch 13)
• “if so-called vice gives you greater pleasure, then the natural and proper course is to scrap virtue. Which will usually be the result if you face facts, because virtue is weaker. Virtue means not doing things. Virtue means timidity, obedience. Virtue means conforming to custom. Vice, on the other hand, is (or should be) bold and adventurous and enlarging." (Ch 13)

Selected quotes:

• “Organized goodness has had a long inning and, it must be confessed, often a painful one.” (Prologue)
• “The golden rule, as Shaw said centuries later, is that there are no golden rules.” (Ch 1)
• "When he [the Messiah] failed to arrive, the Kabbalah offered the ghetto-weary a path of release” (Ch 2)
• “In 1736 Bishop Butler—one of the few Anglican clerics of high mental attainments—declared that most educated men had ceased to regard Christianity as even an object of inquiry, ‘its fictitious nature being so obvious’.” (Ch 3)
• “the less gifted could make hay while the philosophic sun shone—and, having made it, could roll in it.” (Ch 5)
• “No one in England was prepared—yet—to condone stealing or murder also, on the ground that “natural” promptings can inspire crime as well as fornication.” (Ch 5)
• “When inmates become sick or unattractive, and cease to please the rest, they are swept out of sight to live in a basement, with nothing to do but fret over their symptoms.” (Ch 7)
• “Omne animal post coitum triste est, praeter gallum gallinaceum et sacerdotem gratis fornicantem—Every creature is melancholy after sexual intercourse except a barnyard cock and a priest getting it for nothing.” (Ch 9)
• “The real-life Hall-Stevenson was an unbalanced anti-Catholic witch hunter, collector of dirty books, and hypochondriac. Whenever an east wind blew he retired to bed in the belief that he was dying.” (Ch 11)
• “Pleasure—your own—is the sole object worth pursuing. This should be done in a scientific spirit, with no restraints whatsoever. The only authentic pleasure is sexual. Other kinds are feeble and limited and should never be allowed to compete. Perversion, so-called, is a higher pleasure than normal intercourse, which has distracting associations of love and parenthood. Furthermore, the essence of the pleasure in sex is egotistic and manipulative. Hence it reaches its height where there is the most selfishness, the most cruelty, the most tyranny over the partner, or rather victim.” (Ch 13)
• “Since the secret of the supreme thrill is (in conventional language) evil, an ever-widening repertoire of evil can be built into your sex practices and be made the basis of ever-more-fiery, ever-more-exotic thrills. This is the royal road to an anti-moral superhumanity, which the null virtuous can never hope to rival or to stand up against.” (Ch 13)
• “Sade, and Sade alone, pointed out that the only way the Age of Reason could put its philosophy together again was by embracing the consequences. ‘Nature isn’t well planned or benign. She is at best neutral, at worst appalling. But live according to Nature still. Be appalling!’” (Ch 13)
• “Love? Merely an entanglement best forgotten. The physical thrill should be the whole thing.” (Ch 13)
• “One of his characters does believe in God, for the very logical Sadian reason that God can make life more horrible. You can hope to get your victim damned in the next world as well as tortured in this.” (Ch 13)
• “She loved the games men played with death,” (Ch 14)

Full of fascinating ideas. June 2022

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Also read:

• The Hell-Fire Clubs by Evelyn Lord which is rather more critical of its sources.

"The Hell-Fire Clubs" by Evelyn Lord

 If, like me, you thought that the Hell-Fire club was a group of dissolute noblemen having satanic orgies in caves below West Wycombe in the middle of the eighteenth century, this brilliant history will open your eyes to the whole gamut of groups of young men (and occasionally women) who met together to drink, have fun, fornicate and, sometimes, be violent. The Damned Crew and the Mohocks were hooligans who terrorised London streets. The Ballers "danced naked with prostitutes" (Ch 1). The Beefsteaks ... ate steak. The Demoniacs told one another rude stories. And the Beggar's Benison, whose initiation rite involved masturbation, read pornographic books. 

This is a fascinating account of bad behaviour during the Enlightenment. Some very respectable men used their positions of wealth and privilege to enjoy themselves ("By day the club members might be courtiers, Members of Parliament and respectable members of the community. By night they broke social rules to experience forbidden pleasure.”;Introduction), no matter what the consequences were for the rest of society. And they got away with it. This is a story which resonated to our own times.

And some of the characters (Earl of Rochester, Duke of Wharton, Sir Francis Dashwood etc) were spectacularly wicked.

It even includes the perplexing mystery of how a club of roues in East Fife could read a book that wasn't published for another ten years ...

Selected quotes:

• “The Enlightenment ... was also an age when pleasure was seen as a right for everyone.” (Introduction)
• “The Enlightenment was also the Age of Experience, and the hell-fire clubs ... were out to grab experience by the neck" (Introduction)
• “The Damned Crew ... would meet together on nights, and vow amongst themselves to kill the next man they met whosoever.” (Ch 1)
• “He and his companions provoked a riot by standing naked on the balcony of the aptly named Cock Tavern in Bow Street, throwing bottles, into which they had pissed, on to the crowd below.” (Ch 1)
• “They acted in an anti-social way because in restored England they knew they could, and they knew from personal experience that social and religious certainties could be swept away.” (Ch 1)
• “Many liberties were spurred on by the belief that death truly was the end.” (Ch 1)
• “The members of reformation societies believed sin to be the result of a struggle between God and the Devil that the Devil had won ... The societies had no qualms about private vice as long as it did not impinge on the lives of others.” (Ch 1)
• “A gang of young gentlemen made random attacks on passers-by, beat up the watch and insulted the constables. Good men feared to go out at night, but neither were they safe behind locked doors as the Mohocks smashed windows, pulled door-bells and assaulted the servants who answered them.” (Ch 2)
• “a low room that's stunk like a drunkard's morning breath.” (Ch 3)
• “British writers on the continent show that they were likely to seek out their countrymen wherever they went, whereas Continental visitors to Britain interacted freely with the native population and joined in social events, soaking up the culture of the coffee-house and the tavern.” (Ch 4)
• “Soaping your own beard could be a euphemism for masturbation.” (Ch 5)
• “David Hume ... believed that society must channel human nature into constructive directions through laws and customs.” (Ch 8)
• “it was recognised by the authorities that the tavern was the place where a workman could go to sit in the warmth with his fellows after a hard day’s labour, a place where the merchant could meet his peers and discuss business, and where gentlemen could gather over a bowl of wine and discuss the affairs of the day.” (Ch 9)

May 2022; 214 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Also read The Secret History of the Hell-Fire Clubs by Geoffrey Ashe

"A Long Dark Rainbow" by Michael Tappenden

 An absolutely wonderfully delightful story about love between two old people.

Alex has never really fulfilled his potential. He felt inadequate as a young art student and abandoned drawing to become an art historian; he had an academic career but never became head of department. His love life lies far in the past and he now doubts his potential virility. Nevertheless, he talks to a statue of Dionysus and gains sufficient confidence to pursue Samantha, a divorcee, who is herself convinced that her her body can no longer attract men and that her days of romance are over. Can these two old people, emotionally and physically marked and shaped by their experiences, find shared sexual satisfaction and love?

There is a certain amount of plot involving people from Alex's unhappy past who threaten his present and future happiness but the core of this story (perfectly paced with turning points precisely at the quarter, half and three-quarter points) is an intense exploration of the developing relationship between the two protagonists. Towards the end there were even flashes of Lady Chatterley's Lover!

I was captured right from the start by the brilliantly drawn character of Alex who has an inner monologue that is fundamentally self-deprecatory and at the same time can be astute and sometimes very funny:

• "Fear. Embarrassment. Ignorance. What effective contraception they had been." (Prologue)
• "It was as if his brain and key parts of his body were no longer talking to each other. Not that that was anything new. In the past they had often ignored each other, preferring instead to go their separate ways, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Maybe now, they were sulking."  (Prologue)
• "From flaccidity to awareness to virility to ignorance to repression to chronic masturbation to lust and fever to permitted access and more ignorance to mutual disappointment to adultery to abstinence and back to flaccidity. That’s how it was destined."  (Prologue)
• "Coming up to seventy. Didn’t feel like it though. As long as he kept clear of mirrors and passport booths and didn’t bend to stroke pets. Sometimes he forgot his own age."  (Prologue)
• "Sometimes he would talk to younger friends or relatives, see them laugh and chatter and wonder if they would be at his funeral. Which ones wouldn’t get the time off? Which ones would have the flu? Which ones would just make excuses?"  (Prologue)
• "It’s all in there. He tapped his head. Just a bit reluctant to come out."  (Prologue)
• "‘That’ll be seven pounds please. Special rate for senior citizens today.’ Oh God. Is it that obvious? You could have lied. Pretended you couldn’t tell. Charged the full amount and hoped my vanity would pay it." (1. In the Beginning)
• "Bloody memory. You spend your life filling your brain. Hour after hour after hour, learning and understanding, feeding its voracious appetite, packing tons and tons of knowledge into the bottomless pit of brain cells and then later, when you want something back… nothing. Maybe his brain was now feeding on all that information piled inside it and would only let you have the scraps it doesn’t want, like bacon rind and cherry pips. Maybe it was simply composting." (1. In the Beginning)
• "And that jaw – once it had the clean, sweeping lines of a racing yacht. Now look at it, bumbling around the coast, lumpy with barnacles." (1. In the Beginning)
• "Do I need to find my higher self? If I’m honest, I’m having enough trouble with this lower one." (2. Samantha and the Wolf)
• "Courting? That sounds so old fashioned. Do they still do that, or do they simply go to bed and conduct a road test?"   (6. Journeys)
• "No wonder old people don’t smile much. Not because they’re miserable. Just trying to keep it all taut." (7. Steam)
• "I just walked about following what felt like a permanent hard-on. It was an obsession that stirred me constantly. An all-consuming driving urge. I felt like a permanently on-duty pole vaulter."  (8. Tantra)
• "They seemed to have wall-to-wall foreplay crackling in their minds. It had nothing at all to do with age or having a young, smooth body. It was like being in the middle of a permanent Cole Porter song laced with liberal doses of Viagra." (12. Sad News and a General)
• "Now, however, he felt as if he was learning again, learning to swim again. Not convinced he wouldn’t drown. Still needing to hang on to the pool side." (14. Clues and Confession at last)

The author is particularly good at using actions and observations to represent a character's thoughts. For example, when Alex draws, his drawings represent his manhood. For example, he looks at some sketches he made when he was younger and he thinks: "This was a different me. So confident, so strong, so aware. Suddenly he felt a wave of panic wash through him. I can’t do this anymore." (6. Journeys) Later, he decides: "It will come back. Maybe the line, the marks I make will be different, not so confident but maybe I’ll see things differently now, after all this time."  (6. Journeys) And Samantha wonders: "Did his pencil, long and hard and penetrating, really represent much more to him?"   (6. Journeys)

Even furniture and washing up can be used to trigger thoughts regarding the effort required to start up an new relationship: "Samantha’s chair was quite different. Soft, young, excitable, waiting for the next walk in the park. Welcoming? Yes, or was that devouring? And now I’ll have to learn it all over again."  (6. Journeys) "On the large oak table were the remains of their meal. She stood and looked for a while. Those were the clean, bright plates she had proudly carried in, to be enjoyed. All now stained and cold and empty. She moved to the sink, turned on the tap and placed the plates and cutlery in the hot soapy water. Something ticked nervously in her throat. She picked up the plates and slowly washed them clean; washed away every trace, made them new." (5. Secrets and Understanding)

Other selected quotes:

• "The flame of the nearest candle, startled at his appearance, moved abruptly, and then settled, reassured."  (Prologue)
• "The flotsam of kitsch washed up here." (1. In the Beginning)
• "He had stared at the colourful students each dressed in their own non-conformist palette" (1. In the Beginning)
• "I do try to be tidy and I am in my own way. Just… not your way. I do know where everything is, trouble is, it’s usually underneath something else." (5. Secrets and Understanding)
• "there was that woman with the heavy make-up that stopped at her neckline. Undressed, it looked like a sunset over a polar icescape." (6. Journeys)
• "Without doubt it was her, but it was not someone she had ever seen before. It was not the portrait of an old woman that she had expected but of a woman who had matured with experience and understanding. There was a strength that she never knew was there and yet a softness at the same time. A few marks, carefully selected, indicated the passing of time but in a way that was sensitive, almost celebratory and without flattering." (6. Journeys)
• "He stopped and then very carefully ran his very fingertips over her shoulders, feeling the tiny blemishes left by the sun and wind and time that made her who she was. A human patina of priceless experience." (7. Steam)
• "People see that and all the other blemishes as faults. Imperfections. But they are her journey. Her experiences. Bit like that old oak table downstairs. Full of cracks and knot holes and covered with age. And people love that in a table. But not when it comes to each other. How fickle. How strange." (8. Tantra)
• "She could see the brown patch on his crown where his hair had retreated and red points on each elbow as if the bone was trying to push through."  (8. Tantra)
• "‘Just be smart and relaxed.’ ‘I do have problems with both of those concepts.’" (11. Father and Daughter)
• "Ejaculation City. Frequent visits but never stayed long.’ (13. Funeral and Suspicion)
• "Above them, the same stars looked down on this man and woman, two incongruous bodies, creased and roughened, their bones and blood worn and weakened by time, learning at last to be themselves." (14. Clues and Confession at last)
• "How easy it had been to get lost, to follow the stony path trodden by so many other elderly feet, not to query, simply to accept. He had wanted to move, heard the old stallion whinnying desperately but had ignored it." (14. Clues and Confession at last)

This was an utterly delightful character-driven look at love from a perspective that is all-too-often ignored. 

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Will to Knowledge" by Michel Foucault

This is the first volume of Foucault's “The History of Sexuality”.

Foucault is a respected French philosopher. Were he to be a novelist this might be acceptable. The ideas would be advanced and once could dismiss them as an individual perspective on the world, sometimes extraordinarily perceptive, sometimes not. But given the eminence of this writer and his calling I was expecting to find some evidence for his views.

He rarely cites other authors and this is done hapazardly. He certainly never offers statistical evidence. And yet his thesis is that our 'discourses' about sex began to proliferate around the start of the seventeenth century. This is also (for Foucault, although again there is no evidence offered) the birth of modern capitalism and this is, for Foucault, more than a coincidence.  He uses what I call the 'wow thus' argument: offer a surprising fact such as the coincidence above and while your reader is thinking 'wow' follow up immediately with a 'thus' as if the next section of your fantasy is thoroughly grounded in evidence.

He uses a number of similar rhetoric tricks. For example, he likes to ask questions: “It is certainly legitimate to ask why sex was associated with sin ... but we must also ask why we burden ourselves today with so much guilt for having once made sex a sin.” (p 9) But these 'why' questions assume 'whether' questions: Was sex once associated with sin? If it was, do we burden ourselves with guilt for this association? 

He uses words which suggest that he has won an argument. For example,  on page 17 he says “The seventeenth century, then, was the beginning of an age of repression emblematic of what we call the bourgeois societies”. This word 'then' implies that he has successfully argued that the 17th century was the beginning of an age of repression. The entirety of this argument is on page 5: “By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.” Not a lot of evidence. More an assertion. And an admission that he has 'adjusted' the start of the age of repression "to coincide with the development of capitalism". In other words he has admitted manipulating his evidence and then he uses that as if he has established truths. This isn't academic argument.

Another example. “Over these last three centuries ... it is quite possible that there was an expurgation ... of the authorised vocabulary. It may indeed be true that a whole rhetoric of allusion and metaphor was codified. Without question, new rules of propriety screened out some words: there was a policing of statements ... Areas were thus established, if not of utter silence, at least of tact and discretion.” (p 17 - 18) "It is quite possible". "It may indeed be true". These are used to weasel assertions in without having to offer evidence. "Without question" is used to back up an assertion which should be questioned. And then comes the word "thus". This is a new type of syllogistic logic. This is a conclusion built upon speculation.

It happens again. “I still do not know whether this is the ultimate objective. But this much is certain: reduction has not been the means employed for trying to achieve it. ... Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.” (p 37) A neat admission of uncertainty before a bold and unevidenced assertion. Who dare question what Foucault says?

How does he get away with statements such as: "Nineteenth century bourgeois society - and it is doubtless still with us - was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion.” (p 47) I just want to scream: where is your proof?

“This much is undeniable: the learned discourse on sex that was pronounced in the nineteenth century was imbued with age old delusions, but also with systematic blindnesses: a refusal to see and to understand” (p 55) Undeniable? If it is undeniable then it doesn't need a great thinker to discover it. If it can be denied then a learned thinker needs to argue it through and provide at least some evidence.

I think I'm going on a bit.

He was interesting in the things he pointed out about confession. Here he seems to apply the classic philosophy tool of subjecting an idea to forensic analysis to reveal aspects that might be considered:

• Since the 1215 Lateran Council codified penance confession has grown in importance. (p 58) “the confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations ... one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles ... one confesses in public and in private” (p 59)
• “When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat ... since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied it like a shadow.” (p 59)
• Literature has changed from “heroic or marvellous narration of ‘trials’ of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself ... a truth.” (p 59)
• “The obligation to confess is now ... so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface” (p 60)
• “We belong to a society which has ordered sex’s difficult knowledge, not according to the transmission of secrets, but around the slow surfacing of confidential statements.” (p 63)
• In confession “the truth did not reside solely in the subject ... It was constituted in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to itself, in the one who spoke. It could only reach completion in the one who assimilated and recorded it.” (p 67)

There were lots of interesting fact snippets within this short volume. The trouble is that Foucault's cavalier treatment of logic and evidence make me wonder whether anything he says can be taken as true. Nevertheless:

• Before the Council of Trent a confession involving sex was expected to describe “the respective positions of the partners, the postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the precise moment of pleasure.” (p 19). Afterwards vagueness was advised.
• Erasmus advised “on the choice of a good prostitute” (p 27) 
• “For a long time hermaphrodites were criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union.” (p 38)
• “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transferred from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” (p 43)
• Charcot used amyl nitrate as well as ether in his public demonstrations of neurotic women having seizures etc. (p 55)
• “Where sex and pleasure are concerned, power can ‘do’ nothing but say no to them.” (p 83) “To deal with sex, power employs nothing more than a law of prohibition. Its objective: that sex renounce itself. Its instrument: the threat of a punishment that is nothing other than the suppression of sex. Renounce yourself or suffer the penalty of being suppressed.” (p 84)
• “Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.” (p 86)
• “Four figures emerged from this preoccupation with sex, which mounted throughout the nineteenth century ... the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult.” (p 105)
• Once the mechanism of heredity was understood sex became responsible for inherited diseases and its control was a target of eugenics. (p 118)
• “The theory of ‘degenerescence’ ... explained how a heredity that was burdened with various maladies ... ended by producing a sexual pervert ... it went on to explain how a sexual perversion resulted in the depletion of one's line of descent.” (p 118)
• “The young adult man, possessing nothing more than his life force, had to be the primary target of an subjugation destined to shift the energy available for useless pleasure toward compulsory labour.” (p 120)
• “One of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death ... the power of the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised ... only in cases where the sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy ... if he was threatened by external enemies ... he could then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects ... to ‘expose their life’ ... but if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws, then he could exercise a direct power over the offender’s life: as punishment, the letter would be put to death.” (p 135)
• “The ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live. ... power was exercised mainly as a means of deduction ... a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself.” (p 136)
• “It is over life ... that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it.” (p 138)

There are things here which might be good starting points for an investigation but the overall feeling is that this writer uses rhetorical tricks to support unevidenced assertions.

April 2018; 159 pages

"City of Sin" by Catherine Arnold

I suppose I was naive to be quite so surprised at how rude this book was. It is an explicit history of sex (mostly in London but Arnold is happy to spread her wings when necessary) focussing mostly on prostitutes and rent boys. She is very good on words:

• because Roman prostitutes satisfied their clients in the open air under arches (fornices) the practice became known as fornication which became the Germanic fokken which led to another word
• wed means payment; Saxon wives were bought by their husband; the payment being symbolised by a ring
• gay was the street slang for prostitute in Victorian days

Other discoveries included:

• Gropecunt Lane was the haunt of cheaper prostitutes, It was later changed into Grape Street and later Grub Street "reminding all those who live by the pen that there is more than one way to prostitute oneself". 
• The mistress of Edward IV, Jane Shore, survived both Richard III and Henry VII and is buried in Hinxworth Church.

My only criticism is that Arnold's historical research is sometimes suspect. She repeats urban myths as more or less true. She also dwells overlong on familiar stories such as Oscar Wilde and the Profumo Affair.

Well written, interesting and a real page-turner.

May 2012; 333 pages