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The Irish Pasha
- Author: Louise Foxcroft
- Category: Non-fiction Biography / Memoir
- Publisher: Profile (UK)
- Pub date: Summer 2013
- Length: 80,000 words approx
About The Irish Pasha
not many Cambridge academics can make you laugh aloud and gasp with shock. Louise Foxcroft does both
– MAIL ON SUNDAY on HOT FLUSHES, COLD SCIENCE
Pum Gayer-Anderson’s life, based on his unpublished memoirs, is a tightrope walk across the decline of an Empire. Obsessive collecting, private longings and difficult sex ran counterpoint to his public show of duty and respectability.
As a child he travelled across a raw America with his wayward Irish parents. As a man, high-browed and open-faced, he adopted Arab life, was a Royal physician and psychic who wrestled Turks and crocodiles, smoked opium and hashish, cherished the peach-cheeks of young girl-boys, knew Lawrence of Arabia, Gordon, Kitchener, Eric Gill, Stephen Spender and Freya Stark among others, fought at Gallipoli, boiled the heads of Nubian warriors in flowery glades for Henry Wellcome, and was present when Howard Carter opened Tut-ankh-Amen’s Tomb in 1923.
He teetered over the constraints and excesses of the early twentieth century. Pum’s love of beauty, of man-made artefacts and the prelapsarian perfection of young boys was no passive desire and he went to great lengths to seek them out with a scopophiliac’s clandestine pleasure. His greatest find was the ‘Gayer-Anderson Cat’, smuggled out of Egypt away from the Nazis and hidden in a Suffolk well-shaft before he gave it to the British Museum. His collection is now scattered world-wide.
Pum was split in two: the life of his identical twin, Tom, often paralleled his own, their twinship mirroring the dualities Pum struggled with and reflecting the schisms between civilisations – between East and West, Islam and Christian. This is an extraordinary ripping yarn that delves into antiquity, medicine, politics, self-analysis, occultism, family dynamics, love, war and sex.
About the Author
Louise Foxcroft read History at the University of Cambridge as a mature student in the early 1990s. In 2007 she published an academic title, The Making of Addiction: The ‘use and abuse’ of opium in nineteenth-century Britain (Ashgate), which developed the research of her PhD thesis. This was followed by her first general book, Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause (Granta, 2009) which ranked as Amazon’s No.1 History of Medicine title for some weeks. Broadly as Medical Historian, she has specialised in medical perceptions of the human body and at the way these are related to present day, personal, human experience - this makes for some really in-depth questions and analyses, not to mention the absurdities, of how we live our lives now.
An occasional supervisor at the University of Cambridge, Louise Foxcroft has also written for The London Review of Books, The Guardian, New Humanist, Erotic Review, Daily Mail and The Times, and has been a guest on several BBC Radio programmes.
As a Non-Alcoholic Trustee on the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous GB since 2006 she has been working on AA literature, and speaking at conferences and press events, both national and international.