She takes the view that the poor will always be with us – indeed that they

She takes the view that the poor will always be with us – indeed that they exist to test our love. This is presented as a humble indifference to worldly matters; she is resolutely not “political”, But an indifference (or hostlility) to change is itself, as Hitchens shows, an extreme political position. In his eyes, her campaign against contraception and abortion is really a way to keep the world full of miserable children, so that she can look after them.It’s quite bitter stuff. But in the end the intriguing thing about Hitchens’s polemic is its slight sense of conservativism. What he really dislikes, you feel, is the evangelising cultish feeling – no sects, please, we’re British His true opponent, perhaps, is not Mother Teresa herself. He does not seriously claim that she is manipulative or hypocritical: there is no suggestion that she uses her impressive fund-raising powers to run a four-Mercedes lifestyle on the quiet.His real target, one feels, should be the unquestioning, sentimental imagery with which the West is so happy to drape her And this is not really her fault. It takes some sophistry to blame someone who does so much for not doing more, or for having one eye on heaven while she does it.

On the level of ideas, her fundamentalism might well seem to require opposition, but her work is not just about ideas: it bears tangible fruit. Hitchens might well wish that her assistance came without strings – no prayers with the soup – but the prayers perhaps remain, in the absence of a more equal system in the world, a modest price to pay While the war of ideas rages, people starve. While we wait for the world to change, someone has to man the bilges. And if it turns out to be someone whose ideas we don’t much care for, well, tough. It is one thing to criticise Mother Teresa for her motives, quite another to criticise her work Perhaps this is why Hitchens doesn’t even attempt to After all, missionaries have a duty to be messianic.. The opening tale in The Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women was written in 1882 and its sexual politics are what one would expect for the time. It recounts the seduction of a virginal housemaid by an aristocratic roue.

When the loosely-clad Violette throws herself on this man’s protection, he experiences a struggle between lust and paternal solicitude. Luckily, Violette trusts him as she would a father, artlessly flinging her arms around him and climbing into his lap. He proceeds to install her in a lamplit room hung with mirrors and velvet, and things go from there. There is a wonderful moment when the man, who is also the narrator, gallantly explains “certain articles” of men’s “code” of seduction to his “ignorant” lady readers. The paradox, as with Violette’s “artless” sensuality, is that this most knowing of tales is written by a woman.

Its calculated blend of disavowed responsibility and seething carnality sets the tone for many of the stories in this fascinating collection, which is as much a history of censorship as of women’s erotic writing.
The tales written before the Second World War bear witness to a lost world where sex, especially for women, was thrillingly taboo. Kate Chopin, Katherine Mansfield and Edith Wharton wrote stories about adultery, low rental passion and incest, but never printed them. Chopin’s “The Storm” makes the reader feel as though she is sharing a naughty secret with a schoolfriend; Chopin may have suppressed it because its celebration of adulterous sensuality was provocatively guilt-free.Intriguingly, an extremely explicit account of sex between a father and daughter by the “otherwise genteel” Edith Wharton is rendered not with disgust but in tones of high excitement. It’s rather like discovering that the author of The Age of Innocence wore bondage gear beneath her petticoat. The illicit nature of desire gives many of the stories a breathless, furtive quality which can plunge from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Gertrude Stein used her rhythmic, rambling style and a lot of confusingly skewed pronouns to capture the masked subtleties of lesbian love. Radclyffe Hall reaches unsurpassed heights of kitsch when she has her gruff heroine return to an earlier life as a horny caveman.The woman on top stalks through many of the stories dating from the Sixties onwards, which provide a confident and dazzling tapestry of perversion, whimsy and social critique. Joanna Russ satirises the Playboy ethos with a wonderfully obliging Bunny-boy house servant who, it transpires, is a robot. A sorceress-cum-dominatrix manipulates the “pseudo-reality” of her apprentice between the sheets. Stories about female sex workers with whips and chains and abject male customers add to the role-reversing bill of fare.