Search results for ""Author Neil McKenna""

'Uproarious.' The Times'Terrifically entertaining.' Evening Standard'Irresistible.' Daily Mail'Gripping.' Sunday Telegraph'A scintillating gem: a cracking page-turner, historically illuminating, culturally fascinating, and a book which effortlessly passes comment on today.' HeraldLondon, April 1870: Fanny and Stella were no ordinary Victorian women. They were young men who liked to dress as women: Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton. Stella was the most beautiful female impersonator of her day, Fanny her inseparable companion.But the Metropolitan Police were plotting their downfall. Fanny and Stella were arrested and subjected to a sensational trial where every lascivious detail of their lives was lapped up by the public.With a cast of peers and politicians, detectives and drag queens, Fanny and Stella is a dazzling and enthralling story of cross examinations, cross-dressing and the the birth of camp.

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‘I have put my genius into my life but only my talent into my work’. So said Oscar Wilde of his remarkable life – a life more complex, more erotic, more troubled and more triumphant than any of his contemporaries ever knew or suspected. Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde charts fully for the first time Oscar’s astonishing erotic odyssey through Victorian London’s sexual underworld. Oscar Wilde emerges as a man driven personally and creatively by his powerful desires for sex with men, and Neil McKenna argues compellingly and convincingly that Oscar’s Wilde’s life and work can only be fully understood and appreciated in terms of his sexuality.The book draws of a vast range of sources, many of them previously unpublished, and includes startling new material like the statements made to the police by the male prostitutes and blackmailers ranged against Oscar Wilde at his trial which have been lost for over a century.Dazzlingly written, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde meticulously and brilliantly reconstructs Oscar Wilde’s emotional and sexual life, painting an astonishingly frank and vivid portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself for the cause of love between men.

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