Paperback. White cover with black title.

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Review: This book seems to want to pretend that it’s a serious scholarly “historical survey of the sexual culture of the East”. Really, I think they are using a pseudo-scientific front to conceal the rollicking, bawdy naughtiness that this book truly contains. The parts on flatulence are absolutely hilarious, as are the colloquial words for various parts of the anatomy and bodily functions (i.e.- the filbert, a fizzler). If you like droll antiquarian descriptions of lewd, outrageous sexual practices, you will love this book. If you want a serious non-fiction tome to research the topic, it’s probably not what you’re looking for.

Allen Edwardes is the pen-name of D. A. Kinsley (born 1939), a scholar of Middle Eastern and Oriental erotica and sexual practices. Edwardes is best known as the author of the 1959 book The Jewel in the Lotus, the introduction to which was written by the noted sexologist and prolific writer, Albert Ellis. The book, named after a famous mantra, is an amassment of sexual curiosities apparently plucked from a variety of ethnographical and orientalist sources. Throughout the book, one finds a plethora of uncontrolled generalizations concerning the sexual behaviour of non-western populations. Doubt has been cast on the sincerity of its scholarship. A recent study accuses the author of “more than a touch of prurience,” and warns that “the guise of orientalist scholarship clearly gives Edwardes leeway to express a surfeit of subconscious homoerotic phantasy.”As such, the book is a curious and highly specific example of a more general tendency in Western scholarship—or, in this case, rather pseudo-scholarship—which has been criticized as Orientalism by Edward Said.

Edwardes wrote a number of other books, including racy biographies of Robert Clive and Richard Francis Burton. The reviewer for Kirkus Reviews judged the Burton biography, published in 1963, to be “for sensation seekers and pseudo-intellectuals”.[2] Edwardes collaborated with R. E. L. Masters on Cradle of Erotica.

NOTE: This is an original  book from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. Note: Jack founded the Michelin Guide ‘Midsummer House’- Cambridge’s paramount restaurant. This dining experience is hidden amongst the grassy pastures and grazing cattle of Midsummer Common and perched on the banks of the River Cam. 

In 2008, Jack was one of the co-founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, alongside other members of the Department, and acted as the Foundation’s Chair. The project’s original goals were modest: to build and distribute low-cost computers for prospective applicants to our Computer Science degree. Initially the project was a “success disaster”, as Jack would say, as demand far outstripped the low-scale manufacturing plans. Ultimately the Raspberry Pi became the UK’s most successful computer with more than 60 million sold to date. Jack was drawn to the educational possibilities of the Raspberry Pi, its potential uses in emerging economies and the way it could support self-directed learning.