Queer City: Gay London From The Romans To The Present Day

Author: Peter Ackroyd

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $23.00 AUD
  • : 9780099592945
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Penguin Books Ltd
  • :
  • : 0.254
  • : March 2018
  • : ---length:- '7.813'width:- '5.063'units:- Inches
  • :
  • : 22.99
  • : June 2018
  • :
  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • :
  • :
  • : Peter Ackroyd
  • :
  • : Paperback
  • : 618
  • :
  • : English
  • : 306.766094212
  • : 272
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
Barcode 9780099592945
9780099592945

Description

*** A Sunday Times Bestseller ***


 


In Roman Londinium the city was dotted with lupanaria ('wolf dens' or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels) and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure.


Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music and the horror of AIDS.


Today, we live in an era of openness and tolerance and Queer London has become part of the new norm. Ackroyd tells us the hidden story of how it got there, celebrating its diversity, thrills and energy on the one hand; but reminding us of its very real terrors, dangers and risks on the other.

Promotion info

Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way - through the history and experiences of its gay population.

Author description

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London- The Biography, Thames- Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.