Mr Facing- both- ways

The classical scholar T. P. Wiseman decided that, once he had passed his 42nd birthday, his middle-aged hands were no longer apt for writing about the erotic Catullus. In his 90th year, Leo Abse manifests no such squeamishness in this psychoanalytic study of Daniel Defoe. Neither embarrassed nor embarrassing, he sees no reason to abate his hot pursuit of the more or less hidden impulses that, he argues, enabled Defoe to impersonate both Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders with such instant insolence.

Defoe has been condemned as a hack, an opportunist and a turncoat. He was, by turns, an outspoken dissenter (put in the pillory for his Swiftian, pseudo-High Tory spoof The Shortest Way with Dissenters) and an eager secret agent for the High Tory Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, after the latter got him out of gaol and sent him to Scotland to spy out the prospects for uniting the kingdom.