You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today I'm talking to Florence Sutcliffe Brathwaite, a historian of

20th century Britain at University College London. She has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on the

sexologist, poet, novelist, doctor, biologist, gerontologist, anarchist, scientific humanist, public

intellectual, pacifist and anti-nuclear activist Alex Comfort. It's a review of polymath, the life and professions of Dr.

Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, by Eric Lauson. Hello, Florence, and thank you very much

for joining me today. Thanks for having me. So as you say in your piece, Alex Comfort was,

and is, most famous for writing The Joy of Sex, which he wasn't especially happy about.

The press wants to make me Mr. Sex, he complained, since he wrote and thought about so many other

things. And as you say in the piece, The Joy of Sex was his, in a sort of staggering number of this,

his 31st book, and he was in his early 50s when it was published in 1972. So what were the previous

30 books about and how old or how young was he when the first one came out? He had written on a

really bewildering variety of topics, although he saw them all as linked. And he actually hadn't even gone up to university when his first book came out.

He did a sort of gap year where he and his father, you wouldn't find probably someone

going on their gap year with their dad today, but he went with his father.

They kind of booked passage on various ships to sort of travel around on the cheap and pursue his longstanding

interest in mollusks and in kind of natural biology generally. And he had a kind of travelogue

of this journey published while he was still a teenager.

So that was actually his first kind of published book. He'd had poems published and pieces

published in his school magazine before that. So that wasn't even his first kind of publication,

but that was his first book. And after that, that was his only foray

into writing travelogs, I think. But he published poetry, he published novels, he published

scientific papers and books on mollusks. He actually got a PhD from the University of London for a thesis on mollusks.

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