Richard Davenport-Hines - An English Affair - Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo

Everyone knew there was going to be a general election in October. ‘A Labour voter,’ my father said witheringly. He probably forgot the incident in a trice, but I never did. October came, Sir Alec Douglas-Home was displaced as Prime Minister by Harold Wilson, and I acquired the private incantation: ‘Wait until October’. For years, I would repeat the phrase to remind myself that however insecure life already seemed, there was greater instability to come. Waiting for October became the title of the self-pitying memoirs that I secretly wrote at the age of fifteen.

This book is not Waiting for October in another guise, although it is about insolence, envy and the politics of revenge. Rather, it is a history of the mentalities that made Miss Groom, Mr Wilcox, Mrs Soskin and the Edgware Road brunette. It is a study of milieux : the worlds of Harold Macmillan, Jack Profumo, Lord Astor, Stephen Ward. ‘How separate we keep ourselves in Britain,’ the Labour politician Richard Crossman reflected of the 1960s. ‘There is the legal world, the doctors’ world, the artistic world, the dramatic world, the political world. We are tremendously separate.’ 2The spheres of politics, medicine, law, journalism, smart society, new money, and espionage – each a discrete segment of British society – all converged into the Profumo Affair of 1963 and detonated a shattering blast. This is a London book, which depicts the capital’s good-time girls, property dealers and Fleet Street hacks, and the ways they pointed the rest of the nation. It is about the millionaire with his new Alvis who resented the old order, thought his time had come, and longed to see the demolition ball hit Londonderry House, as well as the taxi driver who hated the millionaire, and thought his time was coming in the October election. It describes the worlds they made, and how none of them got what they wanted.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.