One of the facts that Denning did not reveal in his report on the Profumo affair was the scandal's global impact. It was not Christine or Mandy or even Stephen Ward who excited the interest of the FBI. It was Mariella. Whilst on a vist to New York she had played nurses and patient with JFK, then the president-elect, and Suzy Chang, star of Nudes of the World.

It was bad enough that one of the nurses was Chinese, but the other was suspected of being a Communist from Czechoslovakia. Robert MacNamara, the US Defence Secretary, told a senior FBI agent that he "felt like he was sitting on a bomb" as headline after headline in British newspapers opened the lid on the Profumo affair. Even Robert Kennedy, it emerged, was caught up in this sex and spy ring. Lord Denning and his secretrary, Thomas Critchley, developed an unhealthy obsession with the sex life of Mariella and Hod. They suspected Satanic rituals were being performed in their basement flat in Hyde Park Square. Scotland Yard set up a surveillance.

The true story of the Profumo Affair will never be told. But what is known is that intrigue of an international flavour surrounded it. Mariella Novotny, the woman who hosted a party that spun a nation into scandal, embodied that intrigue.

Her most enduring trait was to embody the old and the new. In 1960 she was 19 years old, and married to a man born in 1905. Although still a teenager she had crossed two continents and jeopardised the presidency of the United States. Escaping the clutches of the FBI, she had disembarked in Southampton on the Queen Mary, a cosmopolitan call girl ready to take the Old Smoke by storm. But she would never quite lose the sinister shiftiness of postwar, rackety Europe. Neither was she alone in her attachment to the past. 

In The Pendulum Years Bernard Levin wrote that the 1960s had begun with "an attempt to stop the decade entirely and replace it with an earlier one". The Obscene Publications Act was a case in point. It was passed in the last year of the 1950s, and was designed to deal with such books as D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

"This being the case," Levin went on to say, "it naturally came about that the Director of Public Prosecutions selected as the first book to be prosecuted under the new law Lady Chatterley's Lover." 

The trial provided a staged confrontation between forward-thinking liberality and tolerance and the cloistered and sequestered morality of an ancien regime. When it became clear that the prosecution's grasp of what constituted literary merit was somewhat feeble, the case of Lady Chatterley's Lover became a case against Constance Chatterley for adultery. "There are, are there not, certain standards" was a constant refrain from the lawyers. The jury was invited to condemn the lady's behaviour. Furthermore, as Wayland Young pointed out in the Guardian, the language Counsel used took on the tenor of Old Testament patriarchs. It was suggested that "wives and servants" remain protected from such indecency. Lovemaking, or "fucking" as Lawrence would have put it, was referred to as "bouts", "holy wedlock" or "my lady's boudoir".

The condemnatory attitude towards the Lady's unholy wedlock was to receive explicit support in the House of Lords. Levin reported that "solemn exchanges took place about the character and psychology of Lady Chatterley, about her intentions and future plans, about the likelihood, or lack of likelihood, of a stable relationship between her and Mellors the gamekeeper, about her life before the book begins". Then the argument developed into a complaint that "the story [Lawrence] tells is pure invention; it never actually happened" as though Lawrence's inventiveness made the act of writing his book even more infamous. Finally, Lord Boothby stood up to speak. Boothby was, respectively the adulterous lover of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's wife and the homosexual lover of East End gangster, Ronnie Kray. His response was this: "That is the thing about fiction; it doesn't happen."