Inalienable right to ‘excessively noisy sex’

The lunacy that led to a 48-year-old housewife being arrested for ’shouting and groaning’

May 17, 2009 04:30 AM
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Brendan O’Neill
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

“Unlike Winston, (Julia) had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.”

Going Dutch

By RUSSELL SHORTO
Published: April 29, 2009

PICTURE ME, IF YOU WILL, as I settle at my desk to begin my workday, and feel free to use a Vermeer image as your template. The pale-yellow light that gives Dutch paintings their special glow suffuses the room. The interior is simple, with high walls and beams across the ceiling. The view through the windows of the 17th-century house in which I have my apartment is of similarly gabled buildings lining the other side of one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals. Only instead of a plump maid or a raffish soldier at the center of the canvas, you should substitute a sleep-rumpled writer squinting at a laptop.