Taki Taki

Take three books

Taki lives the High Life

issue 30 January 2010

Reading good books is like making love. Reading bad ones is like masturbating. I’ve just read three good ones, one of which got on my nerves because it was about a homosexualist, as opposed to a homosexual. Which in fact was what the other two were about. Now if someone had suggested to me long ago that I would be reading three books about three men who preferred their own sex, I’d have said they’d been puffing on the magic dragon, but that’s neither here nor there. I was curious to read about James Lees-Milne (by Michael Bloch) because, although I never met him, I knew and know some of his so-called straight friends. The other two are the biography of Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings, and of John Cheever, by Blake Bailey. But let’s start with Lees-Milne. The homosexualist.

Lees-Milne was — like the other two subjects — bisexual, but unlike the other two had no children.

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