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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Lady Chatterley's Lover
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(1928) Novel by D.H. *Lawrence, printed privately in Florence in 1928. The book is noted for its detailed but highly poeticized descriptions of the act of love and for its use of four-letter words. It was first published in Britain in an unexpurgated version in 1960 (it had survived prosecution in the USA the previous year), and the acquittal of its British publishers, *Penguin, on a charge of *obscenity became an important turning point in the freedom of the press; it also brought Penguin a sale of 2 million copies in the six weeks after the verdict.
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One question from the trial has long outlived the event; the counsel for the prosecution, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, astonished the jury by asking if this was the sort of book they would wish their wives or their servants to read.
The central character is Constance Chatterley, whose war-wounded husband Sir Clifford is impotent. She has a passionate affair (rather later in the book than some of the eager first purchasers expected) with Sir Clifford's gamekeeper, the forthright Oliver Mellors – a typically Lawrentian figure, in touch with nature and therefore innocent of the falsities of modern society.
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