But it's better than spending your life with an emotional limp while looking for a female pair of crutches.As a result, I reclaimed my own history. Such a fatalistic tone means that, although his descriptions of some male traits ring true, his conclusions render one passive.The book lacks any inspiration for revolution. Rutherford seems to believe that all a poor bloke can hope for is to find a good woman, throw his lot in with her and hope for the best as a dependent I profoundly disagree. My recommendation for any man who has difficulty gaining access to a sense of his own self is to find a good therapist I did It works. There is plenty of guilt; perhaps worse, blame is leavened by an almost biological determinism. Our predicament, concludes Rutherford, is that we are doomed never to get over the loss of our mothers.

The woman in pornography is men's defence against their own need and their disquiet that desire ends in the extinction of the self."This book, like much modern writing about men, is rather depressing and self-flagellating. "Here, unlike in the real world, women are willing to be the objects of desire rather than the subjects of love... To do so is too dangerous, leaving us prey to unbearable loss So, for example, we rely on pornographic images of women. The consequence, he believes, of such an inadequacy is that men feel uncomfortably needy of women So we plough prodigious amounts of energy into escaping. "Men," he argues, "have celebrated being alone in order to imagine themselves free of women, free from their vulnerability." In this need also lies, he suggests, a hatred that some men feel for women.Our emotional vulnerability leads us to divorce sex from love We dare not link sexual desire with emotional need. Male relationships contained other treasures, but were not where these secrets were revealed."Without women, men are bereft," writes Jonathan Rutherford, taking up this theme of dependency.

"They lose the story of their lives." Indeed, as Rutherford's title suggests, he believes that, in the absence of women, men cannot access their own humanity Our masculinity exiles us from ourselves. They seemed to take my emotional past with them, memories of feelings they helped me articulate and to which only they held the key. I Am No Longer Myself Without You: an anatomy of love by Jonathan Rutherford Flamingo, pounds 12.99, 184ppMY GREAT regret about broken relationships with girlfriends used to be lost history. This performance among the mangrove-swamps of Sierra Leone must surely be the first production of a Shakespearean play outside Europe.. Nonetheless, Milton narrates with an easy and readable style the story of these English adventurers among the atolls and skerries of the Moluccas.I particularly liked the chapter about William Keeling, commander of the Red Dragon, who beguiled the long voyage to the Spice Islands in 1607 by indulging his passion for the theatre.When the fleet stopped off to restock its provisions on the coast of Africa, his crew actually put on a production of Hamlet. The book is supposed to look, sound and feel like Dava Sobel's Longitude, whose unexpected success out of a slim volume of obscure history has become something of a grail among publishers.The fact is that Longitude had precisely what this book lacks: a strong, well- documented and very human protagonist. They may perhaps be addressed to the publishers rather than the author, since the overall thrust is obvious.

Courthope played a part in this background, but was hardly a prime cause, and it is anyway debatable how far the creation of New York out of New Amsterdam changed the world.Both these complaints concern the packaging of the book. What it boils down to is that the venal rivalry between the English and Dutch in the East Indies was a factor in their later confrontations in North America, including the wresting of Manhattan Island from the Dutch. It is possible that diligent research might have filled the first two of these lacunae. As it is, Courthope remains firmly anchored to the rather bland tones of his journal, which is to be found, among hundreds of similar documents, in that mammoth compendium of travellers' tales, Purchas His Pilgrimes, edited by the Jacobean vicar Samuel Purchas and published in 1625.The subtitle, "how one man's courage changed the course of history", is also rather dubious.