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This paper explores the ways in which antiquities, both classical and medieval, could be interpreted as having powerful sexual significance. That this was recognised, by, for instance, the curatorial staff of the British Museum in the nineteenth century, can be seen from the creation of a secret cabinet of erotic material. However, it has been less widely acknowledged that this did not automatically sanitise the rest of the collection into being morally unproblematic. The key factor in producing sexualised readings of wide range of antiquities lay in a tradition of comparative religion that had two important characteristics. Firstly, it had a strong tendency to identify many aspects of Roman Catholic practice as being directly descended from the rites of pagan antiquity.Secondly, amongst a group of eighteenth-century authors religion was seen as having originated in primitive fertility rites. At the one extreme we find detailed works of antiquarian scholarship, at the other erotica. But both forms of expression shared a common tradition of implicitly or explicitly abusing "priestcraft" through imputed obsession with carnality. This radical strain of thought was less congenial to English tastes in the aftermath of the conservative reaction to the French Revolution. A much clearer division was to develop in the nineteenth century as, on the one hand, the emergence of academic anthropology left the study of fertility cults as a marginalised and morally suspect area of scholarly inquiry, and the development of pornography led to the production of erotic matter from which the political had been drained away.However, I use the evidence of an anonymous early Victorian tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of its times, to show that the early Victorian wave of anti- Rites, p. 2Catholic moral panic led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. Although I cannot and do not claim that this was a mainstream view, I do use this tract to emphasise that there is a ongoing tradition of eroticised readings of sculpture galleries, even ones supposedly purged of explicitly sexual material. That this fact is not widely recognised may be to do with dominant conceptualisations of the separation between art and pornography that date from the Victorian age. Much classical and Hindu statuary may indeed have been intended indirectly if not directly to produce erotic responses. And it we want to fully engage with the power of bodily representations in museum collections it may be sensible to openly acknowledge sexual fetishism as a social construction and, therefore, the diversity and unpredictability of arousal.

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The life and work of John Maynard Keynes should be situated in relation to his membership of the Bloomsbury Group. The members of this circle of friends experimented in their lives and works with a variety of transgressions of contemporary expectations of performances of gender and sexuality. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) had a significant influence on the way in which Keynes depicted the allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). The culture of Bloomsbury queerness played a significant role in the way in which Keynes described and caricatured his political opponents. The huge popularity of Keynes' work suggests that further questions need to be asked concerning the gendered performances of allied leadership in the aftermath of World War One and the popular perceptions of those performances.