In his Wall Street Journal review of Joseph Lelyveld's Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India , a biography of Mohandas Gandhi, conservative historian Andrew Roberts calls Gandhi "a ceaseless self-promoter", a "sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist" and accuses the revered Indian leader of repeatedly botching his nation's independence movement. In subsequent paragraphs, Roberts goes on to call him a racist, a child molester, and a hypocrite.

Roberts lambasts Gandhi for sharing his bed with young, naked women into his 70's, but then directs us to the section of Great Soul that details a passionate love affair between Gandhi and another man, "Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908."

India has banned the book.

A new biography of African-American civil rights leader Malcolm X details his “early homosexual relationship with a white businessman,” among other things that he glossed over or ignored in his own accounts, reports The New York Times.

The biography,Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention , was published Monday by Viking Press, three days after the death of its author, Columbia University professor Manning Marable. It is in many ways a groundbreaking portrayal of Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965 at age 39, and differs greatly from his posthumously published Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“This book gives us a richer, more profound, more complicated and more fully fleshed out Malcolm than we have ever had before,” Michael Eric Dyson, an author and Georgetown University professor, told the Times. Marable’s biography reports, for instance, that Malcolm X may have exaggerated stories of his criminal activity before his conversion to Islam to make his tale of redemption more dramatic, and that while he embraced integration rather than racial separatism toward the end of his life, his political philosophy remained radical. The author also contends that two of the three men convicted of Malcolm X’s murder were innocent and that others were involved but not charged.

 It is not the first source to report that Malcolm X had gay relationships, but it is a particularly high-profile one. U.K. LGBT rights activist Peter Tatchell, writer and professor Marc Lamont Hill, and Bruce Perry, who published a biography of Malcolm X in 1991, have also said he was gay or bisexual. (He eventually married a woman and fathered six children.)