MICHELE ROBERTS, NOVELIST AND POET:

A controversial study claims that Christ had an Oedipus complex, reports Clare Garner

Psychological Notes

EXACTLY 50 years ago Alfred Charles Kinsey published an 804-page tome which smashed America with the force of a meteor. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male enraged religious leaders, university presidents and leading psychiatrists. But it also did more to promote sexual liberation in general and gay liberation in particular than any previous book.

CELINA GONZALEZ ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL LONDON

Lucian Freud is 75 and arguably the nation's greatest living painter, yet he hasn't quite become the grand old man that this description might suggest. Far from it in fact. For all his celebrity and grandeur something about him has always been a bit close to the edge. On one hand he's a kind of national treasure, feted in high places and the only artist holder of the Order of Merit (a rare honour shared with the likes of Nelson Mandela and Yehudi Menuhin). On the other, he remains a dark and rather mysterious character aligned through his models - the late Leigh Bowery and Big Sue Tilley - to a kind of bohemian club culture. It is a curious contradiction, but one that reminds us that Freud is as much of a contemporary artist as any of the current crop of young fashionables that could be his grandchildren.

Boyd Tonkin first review of `Mary bell'

LILY-JOSEPHINE by Kate Saunders Century pounds 16.99

Mark Merlis's first novel, American Studies, revealed an acute sensitivity to recent history in its study of the corrosive effects of McCarthyism on both national life and personal relationships. His second turns to ancient history and the exploits of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, destroyer of Troy, and now best-known as the antagonist of Racine's Andromache. The twist is that the story is filtered through a post-Freudian, post- Stonewall consciousness and the characters endowed with all the accoutrements of 20th-century materialism. The result reads as if Hanna and Barbera had collaborated with Homer and Sophocles on a classical Greek version of The Flintstones.

Another story from the travellers' grapevine

In his first television interview on Wednesday, hours after the scandal broke, President Bill Clinton said: "I must contain my natural impulses."

A pleasant feature of the pre-club itinerary, Freud is a great venue for people-watching, but if you want to sit down before 9pm, think again

PETER YORK ON ADS

Wordsworth championed `powerful feelings'; so did Diana. Jonathan Bate asks if New Britain has gone New Romantic