There had been nothing like it since Sappho and the island of Lesbos,” Diana Souhami writes in the introduction to her vastly entertaining and often moving group biography, No Modernism Without Lesbians, about four women in Paris in the first half of the 20th century.

No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami | Goodreads

Had really high hopes for this as I’ve read some of Jessas writing and thought this would be a stimulating political podcast with a leftist tilt The Weekend". British Film Institute. 1976. Archived from the original on 25 March 2014 . Retrieved 25 March 2014.The Polari prizes are open to books of any genre that explore the LGBTQ+ experience. The Polari literary salon, which hosts the awards, was founded by author and journalist Paul Burston in 2007. Its name comes from the slang dialect gay men used to covertly communicate with each other before male homosexuality was legalised. Dianna Souhami's new history of 1920s Paris, No Modernism Without Lesbians, focusses on four women -- Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein -- who were at the center of the modernist movement. Beach started the Shakespeare and Company bookstore and published James Joyce's Ulysses. Bryher was a novelist, magazine editor, and heiress who used her fortune to help struggling writers. Barney was a writer and influential salon hostess. Stein was a patron of the arts and avant-garde author. Souhami’s book offers separate biographies of the four women, from birth to death.

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Writer and judge Rachel Holmes said: “In these days of deliberately stoked culture wars Mohsin Zaidi deftly engages us with the harsh, hilarious and inherently human realities of multiple identity. With painful honesty, he shows how no community of class, race, faith or queerness is immune from suspicion and occasional hatred of otherness, nor mercifully from love, laughter and acceptance.” As Diana Souhami sees it, lesbianism is much more than a sexual preference: it extends into an artistic vocation, an enraptured emotional cult and a political campaign that challenges the bullyboy patriarchs who assumed that “women’s bodies belong to men” and should be consecrated to perpetuating the male line. Souhami has written several fine biographies of what Truman Capote once reprehensibly called the “daisy-chain” of “butch-babes”; now, in a comprehensive cultural history, she awards lesbians the credit for modernising art, manners and morals in the early 20th century. Between Love Island, Love is Blind, FBoy Island, Sexy Beasts, Too Hot to Handle etc, we sure do love watching hot straight people be tortured for the possibility of love. Cameron and Jessa discuss why these properties are still considered "guilty pleasures" despite the harm they are doing and why they all seem to be designed by incels.Souhami, Zaidi win 2021 Polari Prizes". Books+Publishing. 1 November 2021. Archived from the original on 1 November 2021 . Retrieved 3 November 2021. Hmm, very much not impressed by the introduction where the author discusses why she's using lesbian as a catch-all term for four people, only one of whom referred to herself as a lesbian--particularly as one person had a self-conception "as a boy trapped in the body of a girl." It'd be one thing if these people's behaviour and ways they talked about themselves fit the lesbian label even if they didn't use it. Clearly this is not the case. The Paris lesbians had to free themselves from male authority, the controlling hand, the forbidding edict. They escaped the disapproval of fathers and the repression of censors and lawmakers, defined their own terms and shaped their own lives. They did not reject all men – they were intrinsic to furthering the careers of writers, film-makers and artists whose work and ideas they admired. What shifted was the power base, the chain of command."