In Capital Affairs, Frank Mort rejects the “master narrative” of the “swinging sixties” in which London suddenly emerged from the dark years of postwar austerity and sexual repression. In response to this “progressive version” of the “permissive” decade, he offers a more nuanced account of “continuity and discontinuity” (4), tracing the growth of London’s postwar pleasure economy and the national anxieties generated by social and sexual encounters that linked Mayfair and Westminster to the more “exotic” neighborhoods of Notting Hill and Soho. Interested in “narratives of transgression,” Mort’s “reprobate and shady cast of characters” (5) includes the expected prostitutes, homosexuals, and serial killers, but he adds to the mix upper-class leaders of fashionable society, sexologists, West Indian immigrants, media pundits, Soho club owners and their “girls,” lawmakers, and beleaguered social purity reformers. Mort’s attention to detail and storytelling skills makes this a compelling and brilliant cultural and sexual history.

The stereotype of a nation coping with the drabness of mass democracy is quickly dispelled in chapter 1 by vivid descriptions of the 1953 coronation celebrations, part of London’s conflicted makeover as a cosmopolitan city that still clung to royal tradition. Mort’s close-up look at “Society” disputes another long-held notion, in this case the alleged demise of the upper class in a postwar welfare state that promoted social leveling and seriousness. We meet the “man-about-town,” in his dandyish neo-Edwardian garb, enjoying all the “lewdness” that clubland had on offer (54), as well as Society hostesses who courted media attention with their shopping sprees, parties, and love affairs. Far from trivial or “regressive,” these elites, including the royal media darling, Princess Margaret, played a key role in modernizing London and influencing sexual behavior in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Competing with efforts to rebrand the city as youthful, sophisticated, and progressive was London’s reputation for vice. Journalistic exposés of the city’s “sex crimes,” as well as Alfred Kinsey’s 1955 tour of London (Soho, in particular), only increased the anxieties of national leaders. The metropolitan police, purity reformers, and urban planners, among others, expressed concern about the relationship between London and pathological sexual behaviors, and the Rillington Place murders, discussed in chapter 3, seemed to confirm this image of a dysfunctional city. The media coverage had many Victorian overtones, focusing on serial killer John Christie’s monstrosity and the sexually active lives of his victims, but it also raised larger and more timely concerns about increasing racial tensions in the city (part of Christie’s legal defense was insanity fueled by sexual repression and having to live among Caribbean immigrants!).

The Christie case was just one example of the official preoccupation with dangerous forms of sex, a subject pursued with great zest by the Wolfenden committee (1954–57). Jack Wolfenden’s personal struggles with the topic of homosexuality (his son was openly gay), the effective silencing of the three women on the committee, and the members’ thirst for “dirt” provided by the testimony of police witnesses, psychologists, and actual homosexuals (no prostitutes would agree to be interviewed) counters the image of the committee as “a modernizing intervention by national government” (141). Furthermore, as Mort concludes, while the committee proposed that private sexual acts between men should be partly decriminalized, it took another decade for the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act, while the Street Offenses Act in 1959 reduced the public visibility of prostitutes, pushing more women into unregulated massage parlors and call-girl networks. Chapters 5 and 6 look at the growth of this commercialized sex industry, which centered around Soho, and the ingenious ways in which owners of such venues as the Windmill Theatre and Revuebar circumvented the law to market live female nudity. It was at such a club in 1960 that Christine Keeler, the woman at the heart of the Profumo Scandal and Mort’s final chapter, first attracted attention with her semi-nude, erotically charged performance.

Mort brings together many of the key players from previous chapters to discuss how London’s social relationships and sexual environments shaped the Profumo Affair. At the Astors’ house party in 1960, Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, first glimpsed the nineteen-year-old Keeler as she emerged, “like Venus,” naked from the swimming pool. This event sparked the eventual downfall of Profumo’s career, as well as the arrest and suicide of Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who served as the sexual liaison between his West End patients and his “girls.” Keeler’s volatile relationships with West Indian immigrant men added yet another transgressive feature to the case, fuelling fears about miscegenation and the new style of female sexual autonomy represented by Keeler (as Macmillan observed, it was no longer obvious just who was a “tart” [337]). The scandal generated a range of competing narratives—from anti-Establishment journalists and politicians who relished the moral and political decline of the old British ruling class to senior Conservative figures who called for a revival of traditional morality.

As Mort’s epilogue notes, London-centered scandals in high politics continue to this day, and the city’s cosmopolitan ideal remains torn between progressivism and disorder. One of the saddest changes in recent years involves the proliferation of Soho’s young homeless, drug users, and clubs that exploit female sex workers trafficked from Eastern Europe. It is this exploitative aspect that I would have liked to see explored in more detail in the earlier chapters; the few voices of women documented in the book seem to endorse the city as a place of female autonomy, but it also remained a place of physical and sexual violence, as witnessed, for example, by Keeler’s troubled background and the harassment of club performers by their bosses. Middle-class women also feature as shadowy figures, venturing to Soho for exotic foodstuffs or accompanying eager husbands to strip clubs. By focusing on the intersection of low/high culture, Mort leaves open a range of experiences of the city that remains worth exploring.