THE MISFITS

Grafton, London, 1988, appears 1^st.  ISBN 0-246-12974-3.  Hard cover, 272 pages including Bibliography and Index.  Very light shelf wear, binding sound.  Dust jacket price-clipped with edge and cover wear; corners worn with some short tears and small losses, short tear at spine head repaired on verso.  Book interior clean and unmarked; tiny tears and bit of crimping in fore-edge margin of one page; a few light spots on top page block.  ‘Beginning with the Marquis de Sade, the author traces the history of morbid sexuality down through Byron, Gogol, Swinburne and the sex-obsessed Walter, author of My Secret Life.  We observe the rise of ‘hard porn’, and study the real life necrophile Sergeant Bertrand.  The Jack the Ripper murders marked the beginning of sex crime in our modern sense of the word.  The sex lives of Percy Grainger, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Lawrence of Arabia provide new insights into the meaning of sexual perversion, while the tormented sex life of Ludwig Wittgenstein throws a new light on the nature of his philosophy.’ (from front flap)