Noel Malcolm in conversation with The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize

How does it feel to be shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize?

It’s a tremendous honour. The list of past winners is a roll-call of some of the best non-fiction writers in the English language.

What drew you to the subject of same-sex desire in early modern Europe?

Some of the most interesting projects I have undertaken have been ones I stumbled into by chance. In this case, I was going through sixteenth-century diplomatic reports in the Venetian state archive (for a completely different purpose, and a different book) when I came across the dossier of an investigation into a same-sex scandal in the Venetian embassy in Istanbul in 1588. I took some notes, and came back to it years later, with the idea of publishing a short article about it. As I researched the whole topic, the article became a long article, then a short book, and then quite a long book. I had never worked on the history of sexuality before, so part of the interest was in finding my way into a whole new subject.

How did you plan, research and write Forbidden Desire?

My plans were constantly overtaken as the scope of the project grew and grew. I tried to read everything relevant to the story of these same-sex relations in the Mediterranean region, to make a comparison between the Western (Christian) societies and those of the Ottoman world; then my comparative focus turned to the contrast between Mediterranean Europe and the societies further to the north; and then I looked at the European colonies in the Americas and Asia. In some ways the book organised itself, as it covered all of these areas in turn; but at the same time I was trying to put together a whole new interpretation of the evidence, which, if it succeeds, will overturn most of the assumptions on which the standard literature is based.

What were the surprises you encountered along the way?

The biggest surprise, I suppose, was the discovery that most of what had been written on this subject (with a few shining exceptions) was wrong, at least where its broad assumptions and overarching interpretations were concerned. Two big claims have been particularly dominant: that modern homosexuality emerged quite suddenly around 1700, and that before that date most men throughout Europe were happy to have sex with boys as well as women. But perhaps the existence of some of the misinterpretations should not be so surprising, as the subject has attracted a huge amount of wishful thinking, projected back into the past.

Tell us how Forbidden Desire can be seen as a continuation or a departure from your earlier books.

An almost complete departure. The only slight overlap is with my book Useful Enemies (2019), which was about Western ideas of Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. When doing the research for that book, I read a wide range of Western accounts of the Ottoman world – books, pamphlets and reports by travellers, merchants, diplomats and scholars. Many of these commented on the visibility of male-male sexual relations in Ottoman society. But although I had this material in my notes, it was of very little relevance to the argument of that previous book. More important, perhaps, was the fact that that book had made me think about Edward Said’s theory of ‘Orientalism’, and about how inadequate it is as a description of what those Western writers were doing. This theme does carry over into my new book, where I have to deal with modern Said-influenced writers who assume that any comments about same-sex behaviour in the Ottoman world were just expressions of prejudice. They weren’t.

What advice would you give a writer of non-fiction starting out today, given the current publishing climate?

Don’t try to plan everything in advance. Find a good subject, and then follow it wherever it takes you. Aiming in advance to go for a particular angle or a particular market will only reduce you to box-ticking. The important thing is to have a subject of intrinsic interest — if you follow it far enough, you will always find something new to say.

What’s next for you as an author?

Over the years I have done a lot of work on the philosopher Thomas Hobbes – a brilliant man, with a very wide range of interests and a sharp pen, who lived through some of the most important events of the seventeenth century. For the new edition of his complete works, I am now editing a volume of his ‘Autobiographical and Occasional Writings’; after that, I must roll up my sleeves to write a full-length biography of him.