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Hello and welcome to the Spectator Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator. And this week my guest is the writer and critic and biographer Francis Wilson,

whose new book is called Burning Man, The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence.

Francis, welcome.

Now, D.H. Lawrence, I remember you saying to me not very long ago,

words to the effect of, oh, I'm going to have to hide under a kind of duvet-style defensive bombardment

for the critics. You seem to have a sense that you're going to catch hell for writing this book.

Why do you have that? Is it because Lawrence is a bit out of fashion?

A bit out of fashion. Yeah. Yeah, no, Lawrence has been out of fashion for my whole life. I mean, Lawrence has been out of fashion. Yeah. No, Lawrence has been out of fashion for my whole life. I mean,

Lawrence has been out of fashion, I'd say, since 1970, since Kate Millett wrote sexual politics,

which was the book that cancelled Lawrence, having, Lawrence had been the kind of the icon of

the counterculture throughout 60s after Lady Chattelie's lover trial in

1960 kind of made him sing like the man who invented sexual intercourse and then by the end of the

decade Kate Millett who was an American postgraduate student published her thesis in which she

she kind of outed Lawrence along with Henry Miller and Norman Mailer as fallocentric misogynists.

And Miller and Naylor survived.

You know, they were a bit bloodied, but they survived.

But Lawrence was just snuffed out like a candle.

And since then, it's not that, I mean, he was cancelled, avonaleckra, but he wasn't cancelled as an evil man.

He was cancelled as a fool.

I mean, people think that Lawrence is a bit embarrassing now.

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