prostitution
The ‘idiot Disneyland’ of Sin City
With his marriage to Joan Didion in difficulties, John Gregory Dunne decamps to Nevada in the early 1970s to capture the dying days of Vegas sleaze
Provocative, verbose and humourless: Mrs Warren’s Profession reviewed
George Bernard Shaw’s provocative play Mrs Warren’s Profession examines the moral hypocrisy of the moneyed classes. It opens with a…
Nostalgia for the bustling high street is misplaced
Annie Gray is refreshingly unsentimental about the days when cooking for the family involved time-consuming visits to the butcher, the greengrocer and baker
The demonising of homosexuals in post-war Britain
The tabloids in particular stirred up fear and distrust with lurid stories of orgies, prostitution, drug-taking, political corruption, sinister concealment and susceptibility to blackmail
Reluctant servant of the Raj: Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux, reviewed
Few personal details survive about Eric Blair’s life as a policeman in Burma, making his years in the East fertile ground for the novelist
Tea and treachery: Sheep’s Clothing, by Celia Dale, reviewed
Posing as social services employees, two female ex-cons talk their way into the homes of elderly widows in order to drug them and steal their valuables
Ordinary women make just as thrilling history as great men
Philippa Gregory investigates the lives of English women over 900 years – in sickness, health, business, war, prayer and prostitution
A nasty piece of work
Moving among the rich of Long Island, an upmarket prostitute grows increasingly desperate as her many misdemeanours are exposed
The art of window-peeping
Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to…
Losing the plot
The title of the Donmar’s new effort, Marys Seacole, appears to be a misprint and that makes the reader look…
Accentuate the negative
For many years, Michel Houellebecq was patronised by the French literary establishment as an upstart, what with his background in…
The sex work divide in British politics
They seem like completely unrelated questions: ‘Is sex work real work?, and ‘Who will replace Yvette Cooper as chair of…
Why is anyone still defending OnlyFans?
Starting in October, OnlyFans, which has 130 million users, two million contributors and billions in revenue will ban its creators…
Does a man have a right to pay for sex?
A case heard in the Court of Appeal today will decide whether or not carers should be expected to indulge…
So long to Leeds’s appalling prostitution zone
Goodbye and good riddance to the Leeds ‘Managed Zone’ in which punters were given amnesty to buy the most disenfranchised…
On the game
For a novel set partly in a Soho brothel, Hot Stew is an oddly bloodless affair. Tawdry characters drift in…
Undeniably eye-popping: BBC2’s Louis Theroux – Selling Sex reviewed
Victoria, a single mother in her early thirties, is getting her children ready for school — ensuring an equitable distribution…
Washed up in Istanbul: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, by Elif Shafak, reviewed
Elif Shafak once described Istanbul as a set of matryoshka dolls: a place where anything was possible. As with much…
The gambler and the hooker: Awful Beauty, by Andrei Navrozov, reviewed
This book — the title is from Pasternak —is billed as ‘literary fiction’. The narrator, a Russian gambler and drinker…
I rented out my home. The tenants turned it into a brothel
I had been in Los Angeles for less than a month when I received the call from a concerned neighbour…
Mothers’ ruin
At the heart of Basic Instincts, the new exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, is an extraordinarily powerful painting…
Letters
In defence of General Lee Sir: In your leader ‘America’s identity crisis’ (19 August) you state that ‘When General Lee…
The ‘sex worker’ myth
In the midst of all the outrage about modern-day slavery, usually vulnerable men forced into manual labour, there is actually…
The wicked old Paris of the Orient
Here’s the Mandarin for ooh-la-la! As Taras Grescoe, a respected Canadian writer of nonfiction, shows in this marvellous, microscopically descriptive…
Sex worker
‘Of course,’ said my husband in his worst smirky way, as though waiting for an appreciative chuckle, ‘as soon as…
