David Boyle writes…

The main roadblock to a negotiated Brexit still looks as though it is likely to be the Irish border. And that reminds me about other incident of Anglo-Irish muddle which led to extreme events on the mainland – in this case, the so-called Dublin Scandal of 1884, which led directly to the criminalisation of homosexuality the following summer.

It also, as I discovered when I wrote Scandal two years ago, involved my great-great-grandfather as one of its central figures. He had been chairman of the Dublin Stock Exchange, but he was forced to escape on the ferry to Spain wearing a false nose, turning up in Denmark Hill, of all places, using false identities, as an ‘artist in glass’.

His life, and the unprecedented moment of intolerance and fear which swept England ten years later on the arrest of Oscar Wilde under the same law, were intertwined in unusual ways. Writing the book completely obsessed me, and there are still details I long to track down, and his unconventional relationship with the landlord of the Rising Sun in Blackfriars Road.

Most of it I shall never know, but know a great deal more than I did, and I’m glad to say that we are giving away a number of free copies of Scandal in the weeks leading up to Christmas, through Goodreads. See details here

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Scandal by David Boyle

Scandal

by David Boyle

Giveaway ends December 23, 2017.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

I have also included Scandal in the anthology of recent books that we have bundled together as Great British Mavericks – all stories about people who thought for themselves and in their own way, in defiance of the authorities and of accepted wisdom. Three books for the price of, well, about one!