A Biography

Kinsey

The incredible life of one of the most fascinating scientists whose investigations into human sexuality ignited the sexual revolution.

Meticulous and energetic, critical where necessary, never coy, with some brilliant swerves of presentation and a delicious line in low-key humour. Sex, of course, is endlessly gripping but Gathorne-Hardy gives a sense of lifting the subject out of the mean and shabby into a wonderful, humane light, paralleling precisely what Kinsey himself did

An excellent, far from adulatory biography

An affecting portrait...Gathorne-Hardy's enthusiasm for his subject is infectious... An excellently researched book

A deeply humane book... This biography's vivid protrait of a genius possessed is so compelling... Kinsey is one of the most fascinating and influential figures of the twentieth century, a flawed visionary whose brave and amusing experiences are a testament to the rich complexity of human sexuality... With grace and wit Gathorne-Hardy has given us the full measure of the man

At exactly the right moment, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has produced a serious study of Kinsey, of the man and the work... This is the book we need to cap Kinsey's work of liberation at his century's end

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, The Public School Phenomenon and The Interior Castle, a biography of Gerald Brenan.

Alfred Kinsey was the twentieth century's first scientifically reputable and most influential researcher into sex. His Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (The Kinsey Report), published in 1948, was an explosive bestseller, followed in 1953 by his even more radical statistics on female sexuality - both based on over 18,000 case histories. But Kinsey's exploration went much further than that. Bisexual, he experimented with many of the behaviours he was hearing about; and his wife and close colleagues experimented as well. 
 
For this remarkable biography - which forms the basis of a major film - Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has interviewed in depth Kinsey's remaining family, his close colleagues, friends and lovers. With wit and subtlety he reveals whole new aspects of this complex, heroic, obsessive and ultimately sympathetic man.

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy

A Novel

Two orphaned boys - one Russian (Ivan), and one British (Michael) -may or may not be brothers, Ivan is brought up brutally on the bleak rural steppes, while Michael is cosseted by his grandmother in the Home Counties. And yet they coexist in a sort of parallel universe' their lives interconnected, physically in the text, as well as throug a common yearning - to discover their origins and purpose in life and to find elusive romantic and emotional fulfilment. Ivan manages to escape from his past and present to find a new life abroad. He is in almost constant motion, where Michael remains more or less rooted to the spot. His journey of discovery is through a strange, obsessive internal landscape. Gathorne-Hardy combines a rare narrative skill with compassion and humour

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy

Books by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy

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