MAGNIFICENT

Essential Heritage treasured here presented on a silver platter: a counterbalance to the current culture of ‘presentism’ …and on another level helps us understand ourselves and educate others about the complex conditions we navigate as gays. Thanks for this beautifully presented audio too, ideal production values and style.

1 person found this helpful

A humourless, reductive, woke-moralising book.

A deeply disappointing book. Not one bit what the cover blurb pretends. Lacking in humour, nuance or any complex analyses of its subjects. All heavy with a contemporary faddish identitarian language. Repetitive and reductive interpretations of the figures covered - all judgementally ranked as 'authorised good' and 'certified bad' (unironically and moralisingly applying contemporary western standards to different times, places and contexts; all figures reduced and flattened as in a strange medieval pseudo-religious text.)

Potentially interesting, complex and difficult gay historic figures, that could have broadened our understanding of the grain and range of gay lives in history (complex mixes or good and bad in difficult and different times and places) are all reduced and flattened to one dimensional binaries - all held up to current fashionable morals, all squashed under the humourless, heavy weight of Identity Politics (Critical Theory, Identity Politics and Post Modern Marxism).

The authors' distaste for the subjects they cover is clear and makes the reader wonder why they bothered in the first place as well as what else is missing in their telling, crafted to fit such a narrow and reductive ideological lens.

A heavy going, humourless, predictable, reductive, woke-scold of a book.

1 person found this helpful

Completely Unexpected and Fascinating

Very well read, emphasis and pace has clearly been well thought through by somebody. Don't know what I thought the subject matter would be like, but I was really very interested in what was said and what had been researched. Elsewhere in the Amazon Forest one is encouraged not to listen on grounds of insufficient neo liberal attitude. All I can say is open your ears and minds - facts are set out and inferences are drawn. I happen to think they are correct inferences - inferences that explain a lot about the current mess this country (UK) is in. Also the EU. Most important of all beware who's telling you that politics is a dirty word.

Fascinating and thoughtful!

Great book. Audio needs some re-editing as a few rehearsal takes are scattered throughout recording.

Great book, recording a bit glitchy

I love histories like this, something to get your teeth into that teaches you something about the world and your place in it that you never knew before. All the chapters are properly researched and well presented.

Unfortunately the recording stuttered in various places. I thought it was my device to a rewound the recording to discover that it’s the recording itself. Shame, but a good listen nonetheless.