Wednesday 16:00-16:30 Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research.
10 December 2008 repeat 14 Dec
COCAINE GIRLS IN THE WEST END The Bohemian “demi monde” of Soho in London flourished after the Great War. Peers and playboys mixed with prostitutes and petty villains. The press printed hysterical headlines about the Cocaine Girls of the West End – girls at risk of foreign men, drugs and deviancy. Dancing to demoniacal jazz rhythms and high on snow – as it was known- such women were seen as in moral danger. Laurie Taylor takes a tour of this forgotten world with Marek Kohn, author of Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground.
ORGASM Professor Robert Muchembled is author of a new book entitled Orgasm and the West: A History of Pleasure from the Sixteenth Century to the Present. He is joined by Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck College to debate the impact of sexual repression in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and whether it had a positive impart on the development of civilisation.
Additional information:
Marek Kohn Fellow in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex and in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton.
Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground Publisher: Granta Books; New Ed edition ISBN-10: 1862076189 ISBN-13: 978-1862076181
Orgasm and the West: A History of Pleasure from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Publisher: Polity Press ISBN-10: 0745638767 ISBN-13: 978-0745638768
Joanna Bourke Professor of History at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College
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