Agony rather than ecstasy

One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had took place in a Carmarthen pub. There were three of us, the others a builder and a policeman. At one point the policeman told us the weight of a severed human head: it was 14 pounds, and he should know, he went on, having had to carry one in a hat-box. The conversation then turned, somehow, to impotence, which we agreed was something all sensible men should welcome. ‘Be a chance to talk to the wife,’ said the builder. Unfortunately not every man can be a philosopher king in the Black Horse.

Professor Angus McLaren’s book sets out to be an account spanning two millenia of the anguish caused by impotence and of the various profitable quackeries practised by the medical profession in its treatment, up to, and including, our own time. But despite its title, it widens into a history of sexual attitudes, and as such could have been one of the funniest, and saddest, books ever written.