★★★★★
UK: 30 min • Brown Eyed Boy & Kudos Film and Television for ITV • April 29 2013

Vicious, with Ian McKellen & Derek Jacobi: 1970s stereotypes abound in this ill-considered farce.

” Why are they now selling their principles (and their community) down the river with this offensive tosh?”

★★★★★
224 pages • Serpent’s Tail • 11 April, 2013 [PB]

True Story, by Helen Humphreys is a a poetic lament for the dead and especially for a loved-one lost far too early.

“This secretive ménage à trois, conducted in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Durand’s grand but isolated home in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris, becomes stifling and, ultimately, destructive.”

★★★★★
329 pages • Serpent’s Tail • 7 March, 2013 [PB]

Petite Mort, by Beatrice Hitchman is a book that is by turns sensitive and coarse, gentle and brutal, beguiling and horrifying.

“This secretive ménage à trois, conducted in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Durand’s grand but isolated home in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris, becomes stifling and, ultimately, destructive.”

★★★★★
248 pages • Wilkinson House • 1 December, 2012 [PB]

Two stories, a gay love story in 2011, and a straight love story in 1914. Yet what is it that connects the two?

“In one sense both stories are, to a greater or lesser degree, about forbidden love. The gay storyline in modern Tel Aviv is hardly transgressive in its context but, for the older man, Niv, it nonetheless brings about a mental collapse.”

★★★★★
238 pages • Summertime Publishing • 15 December, 2011 [PB]

Perking The Pansies sees a forty-something gay couple move to Turkey and into the midst of Imperial minded ex-pats.

“By working their way round the map of the Mediterranean, Jack and Liam eventually settle on Turkey as being both affordable and, for a Muslim country at least, reasonably tolerant.”

★★★★★
307 pages • Matador • September 09, 2012 [PB]

For a bleak book with a high death count, David Gee’s The Dropout is also also witty, clever, insightful and worldly-wise.

“David Gee’s tongue-in-cheek, if dark, social and sexual satire (a sort of cross between David Lodge and Tom Sharpe) leads us through a topsy-turvy world of sexual shenanigans and unconventional relationships.”

★★★★★
368 pages • The Bodley Head • 1915 [HB]

With the renewed interest in Ford Madox Ford sparked by the BBC serialisation of Parade’s End, Tim Bennett-Goodman looks at The Good Soldier

“The story revolves around the relationship of two married couples, the American Dowells (John and Florence) and the English Ashburnhams (Edward and Leonora), who suck into their dark orbit various other doomed characters that they systematically destroy.”

★★★★★
307 pages • Paradise Press • June 23, 2012 [PB]

Tim Bennett-Goodman finds Rod Shelton’s first novel fast-paced, picaresque romp which is funny, sexy and intriguing by turns.

“In this blackly-comic novel, high drama meets high camp and the reader is rewarded with raunchy gay sex amongst a bevy of beautiful boys, in every imaginable position, on almost every other page.”

★★★★★
246 pages • Quartet • June 7, 2012 [PB]

Allan Massie’s Dark Summer in Bordeaux, the sequel to Death in Bordeaux, is a worthy successor.

“Massie evokes this increasingly unstable society exceptionally well and provides the reader with a real sense of the anxiety and insecurity that must have ruled the lives of all who lived in Pétain’s ‘French State’.”

45 Years of Legal Consensual Gay Sex … With A Few Reservations.

What was the 1967 Sexual Offences Act all about, and how effective was it as a piece of social legislation?

“The Act further restricted gay men by only sanctioning sex between two consenting adult males (i.e. over 21) in private. A threesome (or more-some) was a definite no-no, but even sex with non-participant/s present was an offence, as was consensual sex in an hotel or other ‘public’ place.”