That the committee drew only on the testimony of notorious men about town such as the Daily Mail journalist Peter Wildeblood highlights how transgressive sexuality still needed to be tempered to suit official standards of propriety. Aimed at sweeping up the street-walkers, the committee's decision to reclassify prostitution as a public-order offence illustrates the inquiry's significance for all sex work legislation since. Wolfenden, a former public school headmaster and a Conservative, championed "an analysis of prostitution that could be converted into workable legislation". By contrast, Labour's legislation has often been is evidently grounded in a moral objection to prostitution itself. That no elite escorts, comparable to homosexuals such as Wildeblood, were called to testify when the committee discussed prostitution indicates that female sexuality was still seen through the prism of Victorian morality. 

The economics of sex has generally been absent from liberal assessments of the Permissive Society, but Mort's chapter on Soho demonstrates how this historic sex quarter capitalised on a version of "metrosexuality" long before the concept was applied to the likes of Jude Law. 

Relating how the nude tableaux of that wartime favourite, the Windmill, morphed into the striptease culture of Paul Raymond's Revuebar, Mort argues this shift in the economics of the sex-entertainment industry — from corporate paternalism to more free-market principles — made female performative sexuality in Soho as significant for sexual politics as struggles over homosexuality and pornography. That this may have anticipated today's sexual free market where porn stars and glamour models earn far more than MPs makes for a pertinent comparison.

The book climaxes with Mort's rereading of the Profumo Affair. As a melting pot of commercial and cultural ambition, Soho was the ideal launch pad for a socially disruptive siren such as Christine Keeler.  

What made this prototypical sex scandal so incandescent, he argues, was not the Tory War Secretary's extramarital affair, but his "wilful disregard" for "society's golden rule" of discretion. In Profumo, social anxieties over miscegenation, sexual transgression and seemingly amorphous class boundaries reached a crescendo. Mort shows how it was Keeler's geographical and social fluidity, signified by her sexual association with Caribbean immigrants and the English elite alike, combined with her ability to surmount the boundaries of prostitute, showgirl and mistress, and her rare talent for self-publicity, which so violated social propriety. Today's diluted media dollies just don't cut it by comparison. 

But despite Mort's nuanced reading of Keeler as "the active feminine subject", there is one crucial question he doesn't ask: was Christine Keeler on the pill? The word "contraception" doesn't even appear in the book's index, and it's an oversight not to have mentioned something that transformed the sexual and social habits of both men and women. 

And while Mort emphasises the significance of the capital's entertainment industry, he never deigns to explore the impact of pop culture, another influential transgressive phenomenon.

As subtle as it is suggestive, Capital Affairs is a valuable alternative social history of 1950s and '60s Britain. Sexual intercourse may have begun in 1963, but only after a protracted bout of foreplay.