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Clean, By Katherine Ashenburg
Friday 27 March 2009
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For much of post-medieval history, the East scrubbed and the West stank. The twain met one early 18th-century day, when the "notoriously grubby" traveller Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had to shed her stays in the women's baths in Turkey.
Europe used to cleanse itself more often, as this sparklingly enjoyable history of washing (and its avoidance) shows. Bath-houses thrived until they picked up a name for "bad behaviour" and then the Black Death fixed a link with plague.
Awash with smart allusions from the Iliad to Ian McEwan, absorbing on Roman water-heating or Victorian soap, this finely-illustrated survey turns on a foaming jacuzzi for the mind.
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- 3 Picture preview: Lucian Freud drawings
- 4 Mona Lisa's 'twin sister' is discovered – 500 years late
- 5 OK Go: How video saved the radio stars
- 6 Whitney Houston: The diva who had – and lost – it all
- 7 Last night's viewing - America's Serial Killer: True Stories, Channel 4; Protecting Our Children, BBC2
- 1 Kate Allen: It's time for America to put an end to this shameful scandal
- 2 Spotify: 1 million plays, £108 return
- 3 Chemotherapy is 'safe during pregnancy'
- 4 Rhodri Marsden: What we like and what we don't like are often closer than you'd think
- 5 BBC to issue global apology for documentaries that broke rules
- 6 Lightning kills an entire football team
- 7 I was born to be a killer. Every night I see the Devil in my dreams
- 8 Henry does it his way, ending on a high note
- 9 Modern lovers: The 'sexual body warriors' and pioneers transforming 21st-century relationships
- 10 Redknapp hints at same old faces for England
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