Book review: Lucy Jago's A Net for Small Fishes nzherald.co.nz - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nzherald.co.nz Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Dr Aoife Bhreatnach has spent the past year getting inside the prudish and outraged mind of the Irish book censor for her podcast series.
Over the past century, thousands of books were banned in what was one of the most draconian censorship regimes in Europe as our moral guardians fought to rid the country of any hint of smut.
They ranged from literary novels such as
Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger,
Country Girls by Edna O’Brien and
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller to pulp fiction and Madonna’s book of explicit photos,
Sex, which was banned as late as November 1992.
We now scorn pulp historical fiction. But will Bridgerton spark a revival?
20 December 2020 • 6:00am
Regency raciness: Netflix’s Bridgerton can trace its lineage back to the work of such 20th-century novelists as Georgette Heyer, Anya Seton and Jean Plaidy
Credit: Netflix
On Christmas Day, Netflix launches its latest glossy historical drama, a Regency romp called Bridgerton. It promises to be the same breed of mildly sexed-up Jane Austen pastiche as Andrew Davies’s ITV series Sanditon, which flopped last year.
And, like The Crown, which applies so much poetic licence to true events, Bridgerton is unlikely to win the streaming giant any awards for historical accuracy. The source material, after all, is a series of novels by the American writer Julia Quinn, the titles of which – The Viscount Who Loved Me, It’s in His Kiss – don’t exactly conjure up the Regency period.
A top 10 list of the best banned literary filth irishtimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from irishtimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.