Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Is Emily Dickinson “the female Sade”? Is Donatello’s David a bit of paedophile pornography? What is the secret kinship between Byron and Elvis Presley, between the Medusa and Madonna? How do liberals and feminists – as well as conservatives – fatally misread human nature? This audacious and omnivorously learned work of guerilla scholarship offers nothing less than a unified-field theory of Western culture, high and low, since the Egyptians invented beauty – making a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilisation and demonic nature.