Foot

Did you know that during Philip II's reign, a man who touched the foot of a woman who was not his wife could be executed? That Thomas Hardy and F Scott Fitzgerald were foot fetishists, whereas Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were bootmen? That the foot contains 26 bones, 33 joints, 107 ligaments, 19 muscles and yards of nerves and blood vessels? In "Foot", Kathy Vanderlinden has collected a closetful of fascinating information about the physical foot, foot fashion, foot fetishism and other aspects of that part of the body so many of us hate. Physically, our feet are unsung heroes, absorbing some five million pounds of pressure per day as they do their job of carting us from place to place. Then there is the giddy pleasure, the lust, the allure, the therapeutic value of shoes for the shoe lover, from the stiltlike chopine of 15th-century France and the outlandishly wide duckbill of 16th-century England to the gorgeous Manolo Blahniks of today. Vanderlinden also offers tantalising titbits about foot afflictions (bunions, corns and calluses), foot rituals and symbolism (from foot washing to sipping champagne from a lover's shoe), foot fairytales and folklore (Cinderella being the pre-eminent example), and foot beauty treatments (Cleopatra had many of them).