RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES
An English Affair
Sex, Class and Power in the
Age of Profumo
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2013
Copyright © Richard Davenport-Hines 2013
The right of Richard Davenport-Hines to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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Source ISBN: 9780007435845
Ebook Edition © January 2013 ISBN: 9780007435869
Version: 2019-09-24
For Jenny, Christopher and Hugo, and never forgetting Cosmo
Though most English men and women cannot ‘let themselves go’, they love to think and read about people who do throw off inhibitions, either with sex or violence – provided they are punished.
Geoffrey Gorer, ‘This is the English’, The People, 30 September 1951
Snobbery – of all kinds – and prurience are the two most obvious vices of this country.
‘Anatomy of Hysteria’, Spectator, 15 November 1957
One thinks immediately of all the dreary little snobberies, the triviality, the emptiness, the susceptibility to stupid vogues. How drab and provincial we have become! How enslaved to gimmicks! English inventiveness and energy, which used to be an example to the world – have they dried up altogether, or is it simply a bad period we are going through? The two great inventions of the English, their political system and their literature, both seem at the moment rather dwindled and shabby. The parliamentary two-party system has become, whether temporarily or forever, a mere contest between public relation outfits, with professional ad men in the back room.
John Wain, ‘The Month’, Twentieth Century, July 1959
CONTENTS
Also by Richard Davenport-Hines
In May of 1963, when I was nine, Miss Vera Groom, the old spinster who taught me English, asked her class to name a noun beginning with a vowel. There was a new word that I was proud of knowing. I had discovered it from the cook’s Daily Express. I raised my hand, and in response to a nod from her cried out ‘Orgy!’ Miss Groom trembled: she gripped the edge of her desk; her face flushed with blood; her skin turned puce. ‘You are a foul boy,’ she said, and sent me to be caned by the headmaster.
A few days later Mr Wilcox addressed the school. It was the year Dr No sold 437,000 copies in paperback. Warner Wilcox was then in his early forties, but seemed old to me. Like