In 1954, at the trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for homosexuality, the counsel for the prosecution, G.D. 'Khaki' Roberts ('fruity-voiced, with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand'), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was 'infinitely his social inferior', as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. 'Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was associating with people who were infinitely my social inferiors,' Wildeblood replied; but the war was over and with it the Bakhtinian moment of misrule when the strings of degree were untuned and, to everyone's surprise, not discord but fellowship followed.

LRB 8 April 2010 | PDF Download