Shaw famously said that polite society does not allow the three most interesting topics of discussion: religion, politics, and sex. For a thorough and thoroughly civil account of sex, we have now Louis Crompton’s monumental but compendious study, Homosexuality and Civilization (Belknap Press, $35, 623 pp.). Don’t let its encyclopedic title scare you away. It’s handsomely illustrated with fine art (Belknap underwrote its publication for a low price) and written in the best English style: easy, colloquial, clear, understated. Deeply learned, it relies on abundant quotations (not paraphrases) from primary sources. 

Homosexuality is part of a thoroughly live and large controversy. Whatever side you take, there’s now no reason to wander in ignorance. How many of us know when the story of Sodom began to be interpreted as concerning homosexuality? What are the differences between the way homosexuality was honored in Greece, in China, in Japan? What accounts for the various ways homosexuality was persecuted in Europe? How did the worst persecutions, in Spain, affect the New World? 

What distinguishes Crompton’s treatment is his ruling genius, reason. That’s remarkable, amidst the welter of hideous punishments, avaricious laws, and general folly he has often to record. His is the spirit of Bentham, who observed, “To other subjects it is expected that you sit down cool, but on this subject if you let it be seen that you have not sat down in a rage you have given judgment against yourself.” Crompton sits down cool. This is not a polemic or even a cry of outrage. For every situation when he has presented what we know, he gives not an answer but a question. “Debates about nanshoku [male love],” he writes, “were popular and reveal the existence of men who identify them-selves as definitely homosexual and were ready to defend their preferences. But did they form a community with a special identity?” These questions and their possibilities are the intellectual joy of the book. 

Crompton’s book is a part of social history and has all the interest of that wonderful genre. To read it is to return to what you knew of world history— much you didn’t known—and hear again those lively voices of the men and women who formed and expressed their eras. His most important point may be this: “Whatever the vocabulary, two elements are present—the sexual fact and the possibility of love and devotion. For many centuries in Europe, homosexuality was conceived principally as certain sexual acts.” In our age the element of love and devotion is now, if not fully present, fully available for inspection and understanding. And it is easier to inspect when we know something of its thousands of years of history in civilizations other than ours. 

I discovered Elaine Scarry’s great book The Body in Pain (Oxford University Press, $17.95, 385 pp.) years after it was published. Subtitled The Making and Unmaking of the World (published in 1985, but easily available on line from Half.com or Abebooks.com), it is important be-cause of its great scope and the power of its philosophic reasoning. It begins with the structure of torture (“The Con-version of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power”) and the structure of war (“The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues”). 

Torture is almost unimaginable and was, for me, outside of discourse. I could join human-rights groups, take some action against torture, but I did not know how to think about it. Yet being unable to think is almost worse than being unable to act. The Body in Pain bestows the special freedom only philosophy gives, where no subject is unthinkable. 

The perfection of philosophy is its unity. Starting from the simplest proposition, philosophy unfolds a whole world, which was all implicit in its beginning. So Scarry begins with the two most elemental things about pain: first its “incontestable and unnegotiable” presence for the per-son in pain. It’s the “most vibrant example of what it is ‘to have certainty.’” But for others this pain is “so elusive that ‘hearing about pain’ may exist as the primary model of what it is ‘to have doubt.”’ “Whatever pain achieves,” she says, “it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language”—to its active destruction of language. 

Beginning in this way with unmaking, Scarry goes on in the second half of the book to the nature of imagining and making: “making up and making real,” that is, to the structure of belief and of the artifact. These are large subjects and this is a large book, but it is not larger than a mind. When almost every public voice is trying to badger, cajole, or persuade me, it is like paradise to hear a voice freely at work in thinking out a public good. 

I was going to write about Shirley Hazzard’s wonderful new novel The Great Fire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24, 278 pp.), but space does not permit and I’m sure someone else will praise it as it deserves. You may want music too. I’ll end by recommending two dazzling piano recordings (from Hyperion) by Angela Hewitt: Bach’s magnificent English Suites and Couperin’s lyrical, witty Keyboard Music.