There are always plenty of paramours in D. M. Thomas's work, and one must respect, if even at a certain hesitant distance, his nervous, experimental, and erotic muse…. Thomas is at it again [in Love and Other Deaths], what with three erotic sequences here, one based on the I Ching, another on the figure of Eve's apocryphal rival, Lilith, and the third on what he calls "a central contemporary myth: the kidnapping of a diplomat by extremists." I'm afraid I'm not very enthusiastic about any of them. It sometimes looks, especially in the case of poor Lil, as if Crazy Jane had been knocked up by Hughes's Crow, the unlikely issue having been midwifed by Nathaniel Tarn's Bride of God and Brother Antoninus working together…. Peter Porter has said, a propos of something else, "Nothing is worse than the man who pretends to be a ferocious Savonarola when...