in this age of convenience food, we may look back on the past with envy. The luxury of the Romans, for whom eating and sex (often conducted simultaneously) allayed life's boredom; the sumptuous variety of the Middle Ages with its French influence; the glittering dining tables of wealthy Victorians and Edwardians: was their cuisine really better, or simply more self-indulgent? in Consuming Passions, Philippa Pullar gives us an absorbing and often hilarious history of the English appetite. From Roman orgies to Puritanism, from the great class divide of the nineteenth century to the egalitarian seventies, she explores our eating habits in all their diversity, demonstrating the surprising parallels between food, religion and sex.