Homosexuality: A History, by Colin Spencer (Fourth Estate, £8.99 in UK)

I doubt very much if anyone could tackle a subject of such size and complexity in a single book, at least with any real authority, but this is at the very worst a good try. The early chapters on the Graeco Roman world are among the weakest, and Colin Spencer is rather superficial as a historian, but he unearths numerous case histories which are eloquent in themselves and show what homosexuals, transvestites and other "deviants" have suffered over the centuries. The martyrdom of Oscar Wilde, the homophilia of Walt Whitman, the Stein Toklas menage in Paris, are almost over familiar by now, but they are still relevant in this context.