Paul Addison
Are We Declining?
From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975
By Mark Garnett
Jonathan Cape 420pp £20 order from our bookshop
Until I came across it in Mark Garnett’s book I had completely forgotten the story of Joyce McKinney. Infatuated with a young Mormon missionary called Kirk Anderson, she pursued him to England and, with the aid of an accomplice, kidnapped him and held him captive in a cottage in Devon. There she wooed him with passion after taking the initial precaution of manacling him to the bed. In order to win his affections, McKinney told the court, she would have ‘skied down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose’.
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