Published Date: 11 October 2008 THE HELL-FIRE CLUBS BY EVELYN LORD (Yale, £19.99) NOT, of course, that one approves of the ravishing of virgins or devil worship, but it's still something of a let-down to find the goings-on at these notorious 18th-century gatherings so comparatively sedate. They weren't exactly wholesome, Evelyn Lord shows, yet younger members of the royal family and future statesmen joined in these secret societies whose presiding figures were not Satan but Bacchus, Priapus and (to a genuinely alarming extent) Onan. So we're talking – a bit bathetically – David Cameron, Boris Johnson and the Bullingdon rather than Aleister Crowley and his Golden Dawn. But it's still fascinating to see from Lord's absorbing study how integral this sort of institutionalised decadence became to the fabric of the state at a...
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