Sexual abuse

‘Many would have preferred this book not to be written, including the Yorks themselves.’ So Andrew Lownie begins his coruscating examination of the lives of Prince Andrew and Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, which has excited significant media attention due to its scandalous revelations. Lownie, a historian and literary agent, has pivoted away from an earlier, more conventional career as a biographer of John Buchan and Guy Burgess to the self-appointed role of royal botherer-in-chief. After earlier, similarly scabrous books about the Mountbattens and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, he now finds his first contemporary targets, and the results are predictably marmalade-dropping.

Laila Mickelwait’s Takedown describes in fascinating and often distressing detail both why Pornhub, the Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, needs to be destroyed and how this might be achieved. It’s not the story of a movement against the porn industry, like the one I have been involved with for decades, but more a woman’s lone, Erin Brockovich-like crusade to shut down a major distributor. The book relates how, through investigative journalism, Mickelwait discovered that one of the world’s biggest websites was knowingly profiting from sex trafficking, and reveals her subsequent fight to hold Pornhub accountable for its distribution and monetisation of child sexual abuse and rape.

The frontispiece of this book is Lucian Freud’s portrait of his daughter Rose naked on a bed. Rose says that when her father asked her to sit, which she had long hoped he would do, she naturally assumed he would want her naked, but asked him not to paint her hairy legs. He, in turn, asked her to remove her mascara, but she refused. When she saw the canvas she was shocked at how much it focused on her vulva, but she did not object. She sat for him at night – he had other sitters during the day – and he sometimes gave her purple hearts to keep awake. When the portrait was finished, she took on the task of cleaning Freud’s studio, which ‘made me feel special, downtrodden, and loved for all the wrong reasons’. Rose was born in 1958, 18 months after her brother, Ali.

On one blissful, cloudless day during the summer holidays of 1972, Charles Spencer, who had just turned eight, surveyed the scene in his mother’s garden in Sussex. He’d spent the morning cycling and swimming, and a barbecue was being prepared. He remembers thinking: ‘This is too good to last.’ And he was right. A date he was dreading, 12 September, arrived. His father drove him the 100 miles from his house on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk to Maidwell Hall, the boarding prep school in Northamptonshire where Spencer would be a pupil for the next five years. We all remember that end-of-summer-holidays dread: the savage haircut, the putting on of itchy school uniform after months in cotton. Spencer evokes this brilliantly in his unputdownable memoir A Very Private School.