Horseman, Pass By . . .

I can write of the liberal agenda, of the ‘new morality,’ because I’ve been in the belly of the beast. Actually, that’s not true—I was never really part of it—more a fellow-traveller.

And I am not claiming any merit in this; rather the reverse. Russell had the excuse of his infatuation with reason; his wife, Dora, conveniently found in the ‘new morality’ a higher calling. I had neither of those excuses. If I embraced, or appeared to embrace, the liberal agenda, it was simply because it suited me at the time to do so. I never had any ideological or emotional commitment to it, but rather a pragmatic one. It was a tool too good to pass up in pursuit of more personal and immediate satisfactions.

But nonetheless I was there—I pitched my tent in the same field as the sexual revolution and was a close observer of it and some of its main players during its seminal period—from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, and thereafter, intermittently, for a few further years.

So I know of what I write . . .