My holiday reading..possible NSFW in blackpropaganda

While we were away my holiday reading was two books - not that I get much time to sit down and read - but I have a Kindle which I use for reading in bed - and I am working my way (for the second time) through Charles Dickens' novels. Not only are they free on Kindle, but an easy way of reading large books. So I am now half way through 'The Old Curiosity Shop' - and it is amazing how much I have forgotten about the narrative and some of the characters. It is great for sending you off to sleep too after a time - I cannot get to slepp unless I have been reading. One key character is Quilp, a manipulative and dangerous dwarf like character - brilliant writing by Dickens - but Q's comments about Little Nell, the heroine almost read like paedophile thoughts - and have a resonance with all the trials taking place in Britain at the moment with well known celebrities being called to account for their actions in the 1970s and 1980s.

The book I have been reading during the day is "The Pike' - a biography of the charismatic Italian Gabriele D'Annunzio, as the subtitle to the book calls him 'Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War' It is a wonderful read taking in the period from the 1870s to the 1930s - and a lot of the material is based on D'A's notebooks in which he recorded his thoughts, observations, and long descriptions of his many conquests - all his love making in great detail. It is the first history book I have read where the word 'cunt' is used as a straightforward word for the female genitalia - and D'A waxed lyrical about womens' cunts.

He was not handsome, he went bald, had bad teeth and was about 5 feet 4 inches tall - but he was a babe magnet - he reckoned he needed to have sex every day - and was voracious - it is amazing he had the time and energy to read so many books, write so many plays, novels, poems and journalism - ride horses, fly in planes and be a propagandist. He had many aristocratic lovers, who subsidised him, and he liked women taller than himself - it is suggested that he devoted much of his love making to cunnilingus - describing the woman's genitalia in great detail from her labia to her vagina - and giving them enormous pleasure. Some pictures of Gabriele Needless to say this was not a book for falling asleep to. And I found this - a feature film with Robert Powell (who once played Jesus) as the young d'Annunzio - otherwise he would be unconvincing as the older man - looks like a film for the connoisseur http://powellisimo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/roberts-italian-job-part-2-dannunzio.html