Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in studies of same-sex desire in British history, building on a previous generation of scholarship that was often more narrowly focused in either topic or source base. The newest works by such historians as Martha Vicinus and H. G. Cox have tended to integrate previously known markers of the field into their own original research, resulting in works that cover broader periods of time and provide a more comprehensive understanding of same-sex desire in relation to the cultural developments of their periods. Matt Cook's work is also representative of this trend, with the central goal of his study being an analysis that “focuses specifically on the relationship between shifting conceptions of the metropolis and the intensifying debate on homosexuality from the 1880s onwards” (6).

Each chapter examines a different level of connection between the city and homosexuality, with the first setting the general frame for the more specific discussions that will follow. To ground the development of homosexual identity in time, Cook begins with Alan Bray's observation that sexual acts between men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were primarily opportunistic liaisons not affecting individual identity. Not until the early eighteenth century is there evidence that men created social networks around acts of same-sex desire, with the burgeoning urban environment providing the anonymity within which the “molly house” could develop. It is the urban map created by later generations of these men, overlaying the geography of the West End but unknown to the majority of Londoners, that Cook then delineates. To the more usual sites of urban homosexual activity, such as particular parks, theaters, streets, and public houses, he adds specific restaurants, hotels, sports clubs, and museums. Cook is one of the first scholars to make use of the extraordinary diaries of George Ives, founder of the first British support and pressure group for homosexual men and self-identified member of this urban world, and the detailed observations left by Ives and others give Cook's account a specificity and immediacy lacking in previous descriptions.

Chapter 2, “The Grossly Indecent City,” discusses the relevant laws and the representation of cases generated by them within the press. Of special interest in this chapter is Cook's analysis of the 1898 Vagrancy Law Amendment Act and how it affected the policing of homoerotic behavior that fell short of explicitly sexual acts. It is somewhat disappointing, though, that we do not see more of the results of this and other legislation described. Cook rightly notes in this chapter that “the homosexual life of the city was rarely out of the public eye and the newspaper-reading public had consistent reminders of it” (48), but the discussion of reported trials here is largely centered on the well-known Cleveland Street scandal and the trials of Oscar Wilde, with only passing details given from other cases.

Indeed, from the sexologists who are evaluated in chapter 3 to the aesthetic and decadent writers who are described in chapter 4, many of the markers that Cook considers are familiar, yet it is also in these later chapters where Cook's analysis of them in relation to the city begins to generate increasingly original insights. His argument that because sexology itself was a wholly urban movement it was predisposed to see homosexuality as a determinedly urban phenomenon, related to the nervous disorders associated with cities, is convincing. Likewise Lord Henry Wootton's walk through the West End in the early pages of The Picture of Dorian Gray is the subject of a fascinating interpretation by Cook as he ties it into his previous discussion of London's urban spaces.

The most insightful observations stemming from the analysis of homosexuality in the frame of the urban environment come in the final chapter, “The Hellenic City.” In this chapter Cook explains how the classical ideal provided an alternative to the urban context for the grounding of a positive identity incorporating same-sex desire. The chapter explores how John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, and George Ives each grappled with the choice between these two possibilities for the expression and justification of their passions for other men. It is precisely because these men saw it as a choice between two largely antithetical options, and because those choices were explained and justified, that Cook is able to interrogate the meaning of the urban identification for these men so successfully here.

By the end of his work Cook has done much to prove the benefits of his method of analysis, although some questions remain over his choice of periodization. He acknowledges that H. G. Cox has demonstrated that 1885 did not represent as significant a break in the state's prosecution of homosexual activity as has been often argued in the historiography, but he does not offer further explanations as to why this date should still be seen as a watershed. More important an issue is the conclusion of the study in 1914, which stems not so much from the inappropriateness of the date but rather from the amount of the material that carries through to that year. Judicial statistics are provided to demonstrate that there was neither a dramatic increase nor decrease in the number of prosecutions for sodomy, attempted sodomy, or gross indecency in two decades after the Wilde trials, yet we do not get a strong sense of what else occurred in these years. Whether over this same period there were equally few changes in the public representation of these cases within the press, or in patterns of the use of urban space by homosexual men, could have received more attention.

Overall, though, Cook brings the major figures, texts, and events relevant to the study of male homosexuality in this period together into a concise and original analysis. His juxtaposition of particular individuals and works is often as interesting as the relationships that he draws between them and the urban environment.