The sixth form at the boys' boarding-school where I was educated was addressed on one occasion by an outside speaker, a sanctimonious pedagogue who announced to us that he and his wife - bootfaced on the platform beside him - had overcome sex. He counselled us to do the same. To an audience of overheated 17-year-olds whose only ambition was for sex to overcome them, the proposition was as mystifying as a book written by a judge and called Overcoming Law.

LRB 19 October 1995 | PDF Download