How Jean Genet invented the internet (Independent on Sunday, June 2003) `I had already wondered what would become of the meeting of a handsome young guard and a handsome young criminal,’ wrote Jean Genet in his 1943 debut prison novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, penned while he was himself… Read More »Toughs, Low-Life, Drag Queens – Genet Was The Daddy of Them All
Mark Simpson undresses the tortured relationship between American men and their swimsuits PROHIBITED… THE WEARING OF SKIN-TIGHT FORM-FITTING OR BIKINI TYPE APPAREL OR BATHING SUITS BY MALES OVER 12 YRS. AGE If the stern, killjoy rubric of this warning sign, erected in the 1960s by the good people of Cape… Read More »Speedophobia: America’s Fear & Loathing of Budgie Smuggling
Mark Simpson on the love that dare not draw the curtains Relationships are difficult things to maintain in this day and age. Especially in the metropolis, where everyone’s too busy with their own life to find the time to share it with someone else. But not for me. I’ve been… Read More »Love Thy Neighbour
Oscar Wilde’s dramatic talents were no match for the blue-blooded battiness of the Douglases (Independent on Sunday, March 2002) There is a terrible, filthy vice which should strike horror and shame into the hearts of any red-blooded Englishman, and which is closely and intimately associated with an effete 19th-century Anglo-Irish… Read More »Revenge of the Psychocrumpet
It seems my joshing, bantering, rib-poking review for the Independent on Sunday of a British book about Australian sports has not been taken in the manly fashion it was meant Down Under. Au contraire, it appears to have caused outrage and even threatens to break-up the Commonwealth. Philip Knightley, columnist on the main Australian daily the Sydney… Read More »Mark Simpson provokes diplomatic incident Down Under