J W M Thompson
Unparliamentary Behaviour
An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo
By Richard Davenport-Hines
HarperPress 400pp £20 order from our bookshop
This is a formidable account of one of the nastier episodes in our recent history. It poses a number of questions – about police integrity, about morality in public life, about the toxic influence of an unscrupulous popular press. However, one additional query might be: what made it a peculiarly English affair? After all, senior politicians in other countries get into hot water over women. No doubt they also tell lies about it. What did Profumo have that scandals in, say, Rome, Paris or Washington lacked? Richard Davenport-Hines quickly makes it clear that he is dealing with much more than one man’s disgrace. Instead he is recording what he sees as a ‘shattering blast’ that rocked an already insecure Establishment. It is the tawdry England of the Sixties that he sets out to dissect, and he goes about the task with energy and impressive command of detail.
Those who lived through that period will certainly recognise the scene. London was a shabby postwar city, many of its familiar features having been destroyed either by bombing or by ruthless ‘development’. Among its population was a fair proportion of chancers of one sort or another (including of course what
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back