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A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain, by Simon Goldhill; pp. 344. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016, $35.00, $25.00 paper. In his [...]

Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain, 1800-1940, edited by Alan Kidd and David Nicholls; pp. xiv + 223. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999, £46.00, [...]

Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform. By CHARLES UPCHURCH. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Pp. 288. $45.00 (cloth). Charles Upchurch's new book, Before Wilde: Sex [...]

The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850-1930, by Yvonne Ivory; pp. ix + 240. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 45.00 [pounds sterling], $85.00. Victorianists working across a broad [...]

Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750, by Clive Emsley; pp. x + 225. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005, 19.99 £, $39.95. In his most recent book [...]

This article examines the topics of the male body, beauty and beauty culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. By exploring work ranging from the study of sport and physical culture to disability and disfigurement in the First World War and queer history, this piece argues that historians should place at the centre, not marginalize, examinations of physical appearance, aesthetics and the adornment and manipulation of the body. Such an approach, it is argued, will only serve to enhance the field of masculinity studies and enrich understandings of the British past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a reading of published writings and a series of private letters and medical records, this article explores the life and career of the mountaineer Sir James Outram (1864–1925) in order to argue for a new, more psychologically oriented conceptualisation of the relationship between empire, masculinity and male sexuality. At its core is an attempt to understand both the sexual transgressions that forced Outram to flee Britain for Canada in 1900 and the impact that his travels across the Atlantic and his physical activities in the Rocky Mountains had on his gender and sexual subjectivities. As an intervention into the history of same-sex desire and behaviour in Britain and the Empire, this piece explores Outram's complicated relationship to the predominant sexual categories of the day and the masculine ideals that held considerable sway in the late imperial period. It also documents the Outram family's interactions with members of the emerging psychiatric profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]