In the long tide ofhistory, the world-famous reticence of the British is a very recentdevelopment. Less than a hundred years old in fact. The rakish ways ofthe regency, the roistering Restoration and the downright rowdyism ofthe Tudor era are older and more firmly rooted traditions among thesetough island people that Victorian middle-class morality or latter dayneo-Freudianism.It needed only a gadget – a mechanical marvel –to make the British dispense with polite fol-de-rol and come right outwith the view that sex does exist. Once having admitted this, theEnglish Government, always fiercely partisan in their gloriouslymuddle-headed fashion, refused to permit anybody to be without sex.Anyone could have told them this would make trouble.Forif the British have a proud (if somewhat obscure) history of joyouslicentiousness, they have an equally proud history of stubborn refusalto permit any invasion of their private lives. Thus the struggle began.Although not titanic in proportions (it is, after all, a quite smalisland) its results were hilarious and its effects far-reaching, indeed,world-wide - and that too was part of a proud British tradition.ASIN: B007YVM0ME