An apt, infamous-British-trials-related association copy of the first Penguin edition of H. Montgomery Hyde’s account of the Wilde trials, inscribed to the British barrister Jeremy Hutchinson in the month he lost the obscenity trial against Gareth Powell’s uncensored Mayflower Books edition of Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure, Fanny Hill (1963); Hutchinson had worked on the (successful) defence team in The Lady Chatterley trial, R v Penguin Books Ltd (1960), the test case for the Obscene Publications Act 1959.
Three years before the publication of this new and enlarged paperback edition of Montgomery Hyde’s account of the Wilde trials, the Unionist MP for Belfast North was deselected by his party, having argued in favour of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in a debate about implementing the Wolfenden report.