An English affair: sex, class and power in the age of Profumo

Description

A racy snapshot of Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Profumo Affair. Britain in the late 1950s was a highly regimented society, still dominated by the memory of two world wars. The Prime Minster, Harold Macmillan, was a patrician former publisher who was associated in the public mind with the grouse moor, and the Conservative Party he led favoured stability, hierarchy, traditional morality and a conservative resistance to change. But beneath the surface were pent-up social forces that burst into the open with the Profumo Affair. In An English Affair, the masterly biographer Richard Davenport-Hines introduces us to a compelling cast of characters among them the aristocrat Lord Astor, the society osteopath Stephen Ward, the call-girl Christine Keeler and Minister of War Jack Profumo as the story builds to its gripping and deadly climax. In so doing he exposes the hypocrisy and prejudice of a country on the brink...