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The Naked Truth About Harrison Marks.
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As an academic researcher, I’ve taken the plunge into areas that others often fear to tread to trace something of the hidden erotic history of Britain. In this stretch of experience, you’ll find crystalized the changes of manners and mores, emerging fronts against reactionary governments, world-making among communities marginalized, ostracised, and endangered, censorship and legislation and debate, and the long tail of civil upheavals around the Summer of Love, gay rights, trans rights, and more. This is often the history of the suburbs, of dreams and imaginations, of reprehensible interlopers, of freethinking paradigm-breakers, and the index of what British society offered its citizens.
Despite draft-stage admonitions from his great friend, the Jesuit priest Ronald Knox, the amount of sex Waugh layers into Brideshead Revisited is surprising for 1945: functionally heterosexual couplings, more given over to class imperatives of property, inheritance and trophy wives, and the tentatively homosexual (depending on interpretation), as located in the awakenings of young adulthood, as sluiced by wine, aesthetic beauty, cigars and Venice in Summer.
But it’s Venice and its architecture that’s the actual location of the full sensual awakening, triggering the protagonist’s eventual journey to Catholicism as he passes time among the Venetian stone of churches… and a fountain: “This was my conversion to the baroque...I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.” Eroticized Ruskinalia, finally stepping beyond the Anglo-Catholicism of the Oxford Movement.
It is WW2 and Captain Charles Ryder reflects on his time at Oxford during the twenties and a world now changed. As a lonely student Charles was captivated by the outrageous and decadent Sebastian Flyte and invited to spend time at the Flyte's family home - the magnificent Brideshead. Here Charles becomes infatuated by its eccentric, aristocratic inhabitants, and in particular with Julia, Sebastian's startling and remote sister. But as his own spiritual and social distance becomes marked, Charles discovers a crueller world, where duty and desire, faith and happiness can only ever conflict.
As an academic researcher, I’ve taken the plunge into areas that others often fear to tread to trace something of the hidden erotic history of Britain. In this stretch of experience, you’ll find crystalized the changes of manners and mores, emerging fronts against reactionary governments, world-making among communities marginalized, ostracised, and endangered, censorship and legislation and debate, and the long tail of civil upheavals around the Summer of Love, gay rights, trans rights, and more. This is often the history of the suburbs, of dreams and imaginations, of reprehensible interlopers, of freethinking paradigm-breakers, and the index of what British society offered its citizens.
This was only published way after Forster’s death–and I can quite see why: it would have whipped up a storm of unimaginable controversy with its story of homosexual love between two Cambridge students and then (steady yourself!) one of those students in later life and a rough-and-ready groundsman.
Forster wrote this in 1913/14, revised it in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, died in 1970, and Maurice finally appeared in 1971. So the book, which concerns hiding, was deeply hidden for over half a century. Forster is sentimental in terms of love and brutal in terms of fate.
Love bucks polite society’s norms in the face of the danger of arrest, public scandal, and disgrace. But such love is so delicate and dangerous that any affront to it has to be met with the most decisive action to protect everyone involved–even if the price is loneliness and a life-long…
As Maurice Hall makes his way through a traditional English education, he projects an outer confidence that masks troubling questions about his own identity. Frustrated and unfulfilled, a product of the bourgeoisie he will grow to despise, he has difficulty acknowledging his nascent attraction to men.
At Cambridge he meets Clive, who opens his eyes to a less conventional view of the nature of love. Yet when Maurice is confronted by the societal pressures of life beyond university, self-doubt and heartbreak threaten his quest for happiness.
As an academic researcher, I’ve taken the plunge into areas that others often fear to tread to trace something of the hidden erotic history of Britain. In this stretch of experience, you’ll find crystalized the changes of manners and mores, emerging fronts against reactionary governments, world-making among communities marginalized, ostracised, and endangered, censorship and legislation and debate, and the long tail of civil upheavals around the Summer of Love, gay rights, trans rights, and more. This is often the history of the suburbs, of dreams and imaginations, of reprehensible interlopers, of freethinking paradigm-breakers, and the index of what British society offered its citizens.
This is really terrible–if highly moreish–stuff: a thin, junky, first-drafty picaresque. But it formed the basis of a film starring Jackie’s sister, Joan. The film even had a tie-in aftershave (heavy on the ginseng), promising all kinds of advantages for the wearer. The film and the book both try to suggest a deluxe, upmarket, classy melding of disco culture with the post-permissive society sexual freedoms now available to the 1970s bachelor and (as an ill-informed nod to feminism) the businesswoman.
This imagined milieu was a million miles from the sleazy, criminal experience of London’s Soho, which had traditionally been where all this erotic access was clustered. The aspiration was shared by Paul Raymond, who worked to translate the risqué stage shows of the 1960s (think pre-fame Christine Keeler) to more contemporary fare for the proto-Thatcherite managerial class, keen to see what secular society had to offer them and their new…
In the decadent, hedonistic world of London in 1969, Tony Blake and a group of swinging companions pursue all kinds of erotic diversions amid the glittering nightclubs, discos, and pleasure palaces of the city. Reprint.
As an academic researcher, I’ve taken the plunge into areas that others often fear to tread to trace something of the hidden erotic history of Britain. In this stretch of experience, you’ll find crystalized the changes of manners and mores, emerging fronts against reactionary governments, world-making among communities marginalized, ostracised, and endangered, censorship and legislation and debate, and the long tail of civil upheavals around the Summer of Love, gay rights, trans rights, and more. This is often the history of the suburbs, of dreams and imaginations, of reprehensible interlopers, of freethinking paradigm-breakers, and the index of what British society offered its citizens.
An accidental academic edge and idealistic, boosterish teacher lands Larkin’s non-entity protagonist in Oxford. Behavior degenerates from the tongue-tied comprehensive boy, ill at ease in the louche public school mob, to a fellow hearty and then a rowdy. After that, he becomes a stalker and gradually loses his marbles. Larkin has the protagonist write letters in the voice of the stalkee, Jill, and so imitate the assumed mindset of the innocent young girl primed for romance. Larkin would try something of this intimate interlocution again (passing himself off, as an author, as a retired headmistress) with his eroticized Enid Blyton-like novellas, Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s(dodging lesbian clinches with predatory older girls during late night Latin lessons in the dorms, frequent spankings from the headmistress, etc).
All this is brilliantly comic, proto-Angry Young Man and proto-punk, and counters the chilliness of post-war austerity with…
Michaelmas term, 1940. 18-year-old John Kemp has come down from Lancashire to Oxford University to begin his scholarship studying English. But when he invents an imaginary sister to win the attention of a rich but unreliable 'friend', and then falls in love for real, undergraduate life becomes its own strange world .
'Absolutely contemporary - perhaps even prophetic.' Joyce Carol Oates 'Remarkable . A book about innocence.' Simon Garfield 'A cryptic literary manifesto [about] discovering a literary personality, and the consolation art can provide.' Andrew Motion
I look after the Pamela Green Archive which has grown from safeguarding Pamela's life and legacy to documenting and preserving material relating to the glamour industry and nudism in Briton from the 1920s to the late 60s. The Archive is engaged in acquiring, managing, and conserving various collections, which are made available through multiple channels. We also conduct research for scholars, historians, the press, and the media. Contributions, such as memorabilia, photographs, and film, are welcome. If you have stuff in a box collecting dust that you don't know what to do with, get in touch.
The cinematic tale of Harrison Marks' nudist feature Naked as Nature Intended, the iconic British him that brought us Pamela Green in her birthday suit. The book features behind-the-scenes exclusives and never-before-seen photographs by Douglas Webb DFM, who was the front gunner on the last plane back from the legendary Dambusters Raid [a.k.a. Operation Chastise] during World War II.
Released in 1961, Naked as Nature Intended created a sensation. Queues formed around the block and police were called in to manage the crowds. It stayed on the big screen for over 17 months. The film was directed by the notorious George Harrison Marks and starred Pamela Green, Britain's answer to Bettie Page. Pamela Green was best-known for her short but striking role in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.
The plot involves Pamela Green and a few other young women taking a holiday. Their destination? A nudist camp. Perfectly legal but totally scandalous at the time. Naked as Nature Intended represents…
Over the years, as a Professor of English at St. John's University, NY, I have shifted my research from American literature to popular culture, specifically rock music, a passion first ignited when I watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and re-ignited time and time again over the years. I have written articles, reviews, interviews, and a few books and I edit Popular Music and Society and Rock Music Studies.
Hoskyns’s biography of The Band takes us on journey. We travel with these five distinct individuals as they form a brotherhood as they back Ronnie Hawkins for tour after tour for some seven years before becoming Bob Dylan’s backup band for a couple of more years. The first two albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band (The Brown Album) are now regarded as classics signaling the advent of a new genre, Americana. However, The Band’s story is ultimately sad as their tight brotherhood unravels in a swirl of drugs, alcohol, exhaustion, jealousies, and accusations. Yet despite all the tumult, Hoskyns celebrates the music.
This is a vivid and rollicking account of The Band's journey across three decades. Spanning the history of American rock and boasting a supporting cast that includes Dylan, Janis Joplin, and U2, the book brilliantly captures the raw magic and complex personalities of a group George Harrison called “the best band in the history of the universe.”, This revised U.S. edition includes a postscript, together with an obituary of Rick Danko and a brand-new interview with Robbie Robertson.
We all know Little Richard’s great hits like "Long Tall, Sally", "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly Miss Molly" and Little Richard’s life was as wild as his records. It’s excess all areas as Spencer Leigh tells the story of Little Richard in Send Me Some Lovin. It is a biography of someone who transformed popular music. Spencer Leigh was born in 1945 and hearing Little Richard for the first time in 1956 changed his life. He is a world expert on the Beatles and he has written a series of music-based biographies – Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel – all of which are full of facts and opinions.
I love seeing the scraps of paper on which George wrote his songs like "Something" or "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".
I love seeing all his crossings-out and he offers some good commentary too. George comes over as a thoroughly nice person, but you do need strong wrists to read this book. (Gosh, I’m recommending heavy books!)
"For me, the essence of this book is the lyrics and I believe they stand the test of time because they are written about man's eternal quest, dilemmas, joys and sorrows. George's lyrics were, in my opinion, the most spiritually conscious of our time" - Olivia Harrison
Cherished by fans and collectors, I Me Mine is the closest we will come to George Harrison's autobiography. This new volume has been significantly updated since the 1980 original. For the first time I Me Mine - The Extended Edition covers the full span of George Harrison's life and work, exploring his upbringing…
When I was a kid, my biggest escape was my father’s record collection. Growing up in 1990s NJ, music was a huge part of my experience. Springsteen was from a few miles south, Bon Jovi was from the town next to mine, and Whitney Houston was from the same state but a different county. Music told stories. Inspired my the music of my youth, I now make my living as a storyteller— I tell stories onstage, write books about storytelling and teach others how to tell stories effectively. I have no musical gifts except for the mass consumption of any book with juicy tales about the world of music. Here are a few of my favorites.
Boyd experienced an iconic era of rock n roll first hand by being a 1960s model who married George Harrison after meeting on the set of “A Hard Day’s Night.” The stories of her marriage to Harrison and the A-list rock stars she socialized with, surely would make her the best dinner party guest ever. But if that’s not enough, the second part of the book chronicles her tumultuous marriage to Eric Clapton and ultimately ends with her learning to stand on her own. A truly moving story of strength.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • For the first time, rock music’s most famous muse tells her incredible story
“A charming, lively and seductive book . . . The appeal of Wonderful Tonight is as self-evident as the seemingly simple but brash opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’”—The New York Times Book Review
Pattie Boyd, former wife of both George Harrison and Eric Clapton, finally breaks a forty-year silence and tells the story of how she found herself bound to two of the most addictive, promiscuous musical geniuses of the twentieth century and became the most legendary muse in…
Ever since I was a child, I would hide in my special place and dream away. Reality was rarely the best place to be, even as an adult I fantasize, I step away from reality without ever truly stepping away. Mafia Romance, paranormal, and fantasy excite me, but add in a little touch of real to the story and now even reality makes you wonder. This was the basis for The Devil’s Eyes. I took a new world and mixed in a little bit of what we know is true and a little bit of what-if and a lot of dark and sexy.
This book has its bad boy that seems good but ends up causing his love interest to be conflicted in her love for him and her hate. It’s something I love to play with how much can you hate you truly hate someone you are meant to be with? Is it fate or something more sinister inside of yourself? Love is never easy but it’s far more fun when it’s dark and dangerous.
I suspect it, the first time I see him, sense the air of danger that surrounds the man. He has a way of commanding attention, of taking control, of knowing what I'm thinking before I even do.
It's alarming and alluring. It's dark and deadly. It's everything I've ever wanted but the last thing I truly need. Obsession.
It doesn't take him long to draw me into his web, charming me into his bed and trapping me in his life, a life I know nothing about until it's too late. He has secrets,…
I’ve been an archivist at Canada’s national archives for more than twenty years. I love my job. Archives are, by their very nature, a collection of miscellany that weren’t created to be preserved or remembered. They are the scraps of paper and hurriedly sent emails produced while the world is out making history. As a result, they offer unselfconscious glimpses into the past. Archives are poorly understood, which means that the folks who decide to devote their professional lives to them are often a little quirky and a bit odd. This makes books featuring archivists celebrations of the off-kilter, the overlooked, and the frankly strange.
Bear is a slim, easy-to-read story about an archivist who travels to a remote northern cabin to catalog its contents, discovering surprising insights about herself and the world. It is funny, it is insightful. It is also marketed as “a tale of erotic love between an archivist and a bear.” Yup. I promise you, though, that somehow it’s not weird – just delightful and strange and highly enjoyable.
As a young archivist, did I make my first professional conference presentation about this novel? Yes!
Did it limit my career?
Possibly!
Does that paper hold the record for most times “bestiality” was mentioned in an Association of Ontario Archivists conference?
'A strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.' -- Margaret Atwood
'Bear,' she cried. 'I love you. Pull my head off.'
Lou is a librarian at the local Heritage Institute who lives a mole-like existence, buried among maps and manuscripts in her dusty basement office.
The chance to escape the monotony of her city life comes when she is summoned to a remote island to inventory the late Colonel Jocelyn Cary's estate. Hoping for an industrious summer of cataloguing, Lou heads north.
