Thomas Laqueur

Thomas Laqueur is emeritus professor of history at Berkeley. His most recent book is The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.

Letter

One Sex or Two

8 November 1990

I was aghast when I read Michael Mason’s diagnosis that I had succumbed, without even knowing it, to the destructive virus of New Historicism, although, as someone interested in the cultural power of medicine, I love the metaphor. I could show the ways in which your reviewer either overlooked or misinterpreted, wilfully or by inadvertence, 1. the first four chapters of my book, Making sex: Body and...
Letter

The Old Country

4 June 1998

I certainly did not mean my review of Eva Hoffman’s Shtetl to return us, as she says, to ‘square one’ (Letters, 30 July). I do not believe, as she thinks I do, that ‘anti-semitism is the underlying, essential – finally the only significant – feature defining Polish-Jewish relations.’ I explicitly say that I thought her book put the lie to that intrinsically implausible claim. I did suggest,...
Letter

Hungary, 1956

6 April 2006

Peter Fryer argues on the authority of the journalist Endre Marton, who in turn got the information from unnamed sources, that far from having Imre Nagy, the leader of the Hungarian revolutionary government, murdered as I claimed, Janós Kádár, his successor, was ‘desperate … when Nagy was abducted and when he was executed eighteen months later’ (Letters, 11 May). At worst, in going along with...
Letter

Anything but Shy

7 June 2007

Thomas Laqueur writes: I’d like to be clear here. I was not passing judgment on the life or the honour-worthiness of Fritz Stern in my essay. I was not reviewing his CV; I was reviewing his book. Of course, when that book is a memoir, the lived and the literary blur, but I tried very hard to maintain the distinction. I speak of ‘Stern’s exemplary life of liberal civic involvement’, his active...
Letter

Casus Belli

18 December 2008

Clifton Hawkins argues that I am wrong in claiming that President Polk saw in ‘the disputed lands of Texas’ a casus belli for the Mexican-American War and that slavery was a central issue in the conflict (Letters, 29 January). To the contrary, he says: Texas was already in the Union as a slave state before the war began; the cause of the war was expansionism; and I was too quick to dismiss a pattern...

Pieces about Thomas Laqueur in the LRB

Back from the Underworld: The Liveliness of the Dead

Marina Warner, 17 August 2017

The dead present an enigma that can’t be grasped: they are always there in mind, they come back in dreams, live in memory, and if they don’t, that is even more disturbing, somehow reprehensible.

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Too Much: a history of masturbation

Barbara Taylor, 6 May 2004

Lounging in a boat​ anchored near his home, daydreaming about a ‘pretty wench’ he’d spotted in Westminster earlier that day, Samuel Pepys became so aroused that he ejaculated...

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Do women like sex?

Michael Mason, 8 November 1990

The other day I came across an article by Professor Laqueur, written some fourteen years ago, which makes a striking and dismaying contrast to the book he has just published. The contrast is...

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