But BBC interviewer Mathew Sweet pointed out to her that 'Death recorded' was actually a verdict entered where a sentence was commuted, rather than carried out.

Wolf's study adopts a histrionic procedure worthy of Victorian melodrama, embodying the cause of homosexuality in a narrative featuring the poet Symonds and his love of Walt Whitman and the iconic Leaves of Grass. The story is embellished with motifs of the obscenity laws banning books like it, drawing a parallel between 'books and bodies'. The account goes via State and Empire, legislation and literature. There is one prominent argument in which the attack on homosexuality is seen as leveraged by the desire of heterosexual men to protect their privileges in the face of feminist demands for women's equality in marriage.

Tracking metaphors is the work of cultural scholars, but there is something distressingly literal about Wolf's approach to this. She writes, for example, as though the discovery of hygiene in public sanitation caused an outbreak of the contagion metaphor across the society. Likewise, transferring censure from books to bodies somehow explains the moral repression of the time - and is transferred by the same logic to challenges to free speech today. Generally, the appeal to 'elites' as the reason for this repression is a reduction more damaging to the book's argument than the factual errors.

Outrages is an irritating book mirroring Victorian vices. Sentimentality; the aesthetic life is represented in an arcadia of minor poets. Shock! Horror; the state of London sewers. The bodice ripper; men forced into clandestine trysts with Venetians. Galloping outrage; homosexuality invented to protect heterosexual privileges of male MPs. An improving moral is lacquered over all of it, in reflections on the state encroachment on freedom of speech. The book consistently gets consideration of historical causes inside out and upside down. It's hard to see Outrages doing as well as the Beauty Myth, unless the controversy over the 'fact check' succeeds in attracting 'rubberneck' readers.