You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do. - Anthony Burgess

Dr Williams’s book is about a number of nineteenth-century French writers who caught syphilis and probably died of paresis. They are Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Daudet. A similar book could probably be written about nineteenth-century British writers, including such unlikely victims of syphilis as John Keats and Edward Lear. People were not so frightened of the disease as we are. Few physicians saw the connection between cerebral degeneration and the primary chancre: when the secondary stage of the infection had healed, it was generally assumed that everything was over and lightning would not strike the tree again. This was Baudelaire’s belief. One could even rejoice at picking up the pox: it was not merely an inoculation; it advertised one’s virility to the world....

In the name of Allah the all-powerful, all-merciful, all-knowing, know that it is by his holy will that we come to free the peoples of the Nile from their immemorial and most cruel bondage to the Turks and the Mamelukes, free men of Frankistan bringing freedom, respecting Islam and the tenets of the holy prophet, may his name be praised and the holy name of Allah most high exalted for ever more.

Southwark, where the whores or Winchester geese displayed their breasts at the windows of the trugging houses. They were called Winchester geese because the Bishop of Winchester controlled the property there and had done so since about 110. Traditional Christianity has never seen much wrong in episcopal brothel-keeping. St Augustine said: ‘Suppress prostitution and capricious lusts will overthrow society.’ St Thomas Aquinas went further: ‘Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace; take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil smelling-place.’