Thursday, August 21, 2008

Leo Abse: F&M

Abse was a prolific author. His publications included Private Member: a psychoanalytically orientated study of contemporary politics (1973), which sought to relate MPs' behaviour and attitudes to their childhood and sexual experiences; Margaret, daughter of Beatrice (1989), a "psychobiography" of Margaret Thatcher; Wotan, my enemy: can Britain live with the Germans? (1994), which won the Wingate Prize from the Jewish Quarterly; The Man Behind the Smile: Tony Blair and the politics of perversion (1996) and, in 2003, a new edition called Tony Blair, the man who lost his smile.
In 2000 he published Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love, which purported to be "an analysis of the repressed homosexual components of the relationship between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair"; and in 2006 The Bisexuality of Daniel Defoe: a psychoanalytic survey of the man and his works.

Leo Abse - lawyer, politician, and brother of Dannie - has passed on aged 91. Strange to remark, not one of his books has a berth in my library.

No comments: