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Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

by PeterAckroyd (Author)

  • New

    Paperback 2018

    $14.71
Synopsis

*** A Sunday Times Bestseller *** In Roman Londinium the city was dotted with lupanaria (`wolf dens' or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels) and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure. Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music and the horror of AIDS. Today, we live in an era of openness and tolerance and Queer London has become part of the new norm. Ackroyd tells us the hidden story of how it got there, celebrating its diversity, thrills and energy on the one hand; but reminding us of its very real terrors, dangers and risks on the other.

$14.71

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 272
 Publisher: Vintage
Published: 24 May 2018
ISBN 10: 0099592940
ISBN 13: 9780099592945
Book Overview: Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way - through the history and experiences of its gay population.

Media Reviews
After his mammoth, shamanic aria London: the Biography, the remarkable writer Peter Ackroyd has produced a nimble, uproarious pocket history of sex in his beloved metropolis -- Alasdair Lees * Independent *
Ackroyd has an encyclopaedic knowledge of London, and a poet's instinct for its strange, mesmerising drives and urges ... Queer City contains something to alarm or fascinate on every page -- Craig Brown * The Mail on Sunday *
Droll, provocative and crammed to busting with startling facts -- Simon Callow * The Guardian *
If there was a prize for the most evocative or salacious chapter headings, then Peter Ackroyd's new book, Queer City, would be the undisputed victor. They capture the rudery and naughtiness, although not the erudition of this entertaining history of the 'queer' experience in London -- Robbie Millen * The Times *
Succinct, perceptive and robust -- Rupert Christiansen * Daily Telegraph *
Author Bio
Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.