Sadism

By the late 1980s, the war against pornography was lost. Feminists, as well as Christian moralists, mainly in the UK and US, had been raging against the industry since the early 1970s. In 1980, the American feminist author Robin Morgan coined the phrase: ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’ In 1983, alongside the legal scholar and feminist author Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin came up with the Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance, which would have granted those directly harmed by pornography a right to civil recourse by enabling victims to sue both the producers and the distributors of porn. The inspiration for this was Linda Lovelace, the star of

One of the most notorious episodes in the siege of Drogheda, when more than 3,000 Irish people were killed by an English army headed by Oliver Cromwell, came when Cromwell and his troops chased a renegade band of the enemy up into the steeple of St Peter’s church. When the fleeing detachment of soldiers refused to surrender, Cromwell ordered that the steeple be burned. We know that this is true because, in addition to the corroborating evidence, Cromwell wrote a 1,500-word letter about the events back to the House of Commons on 17 September 1649, exulting that he had even heard one of the trapped men screaming: ‘God damn me,

Laila Mickelwait’s Takedown describes in fascinating and often distressing detail both why Pornhub, the Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, needs to be destroyed and how this might be achieved. It’s not the story of a movement against the porn industry, like the one I have been involved with for decades, but more a woman’s lone, Erin Brockovich-like crusade to shut down a major distributor. The book relates how, through investigative journalism, Mickelwait discovered that one of the world’s biggest websites was knowingly profiting from sex trafficking, and reveals her subsequent fight to hold Pornhub accountable for its distribution and monetisation of child sexual abuse and rape. She is the founder

On one blissful, cloudless day during the summer holidays of 1972, Charles Spencer, who had just turned eight, surveyed the scene in his mother’s garden in Sussex. He’d spent the morning cycling and swimming, and a barbecue was being prepared. He remembers thinking: ‘This is too good to last.’ And he was right. A date he was dreading, 12 September, arrived. His father drove him the 100 miles from his house on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk to Maidwell Hall, the boarding prep school in Northamptonshire where Spencer would be a pupil for the next five years. We all remember that end-of-summer-holidays dread: the savage haircut, the putting on of