Constance Mary Whitehouse was a British teacher and conservative activist. She campaigned against social liberalism and the mainstream British media, both of which she accused of encouraging a more permissive society. She was the founder and first president of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, through which she led a longstanding campaign against the BBC. A hard-line social conservative, she was termed a reactionary by her socially liberal opponents. Her motivation derived from her Christian beliefs, her aversion to the rapid social and political changes in British society of the 1960s, and her work as a teacher of sex education.
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is best known for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Eggers is also the founder of several notable literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness. Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
Paul Raymond Publications is a British publisher of softcore monthly pornographic magazine titles, including Escort, Club International, Mayfair, Men Only, Men's World and Razzle. The company's lawyers scrutinise the magazine content before publication to ensure that it is likely to comply with the Obscene Publications Act 1959 since UK law does not allow hardcore R18 imagery to be sold on newsstands. The magazines are generally available in most newsagents, although some larger retailers require them to be sold in bags to protect minors from seeing the cover photographs. The magazines have also been published in digital format since 2013. They were initially available from the dedicated Paul Raymond digital newsstand, but since that closed they have been sold via the publisher's main website which contains both softcore and hardcore pornography. Blue Active Media Ltd. is the parent company.
Club International is a monthly British adult magazine published by Paul Raymond Publications that features softcore pictures of nude women. It is a sister magazine of the American magazine Club.
Pornographic magazines or erotic magazines, sometimes known as adult magazines or sex magazines, are magazines that contain content of an explicitly sexual nature. Publications of this kind may contain images of attractive naked subjects, as is the case in softcore pornography, and, in the usual case of hardcore pornography, depictions of masturbation, oral, manual, vaginal, or anal sex.
"Let Love Be Your Energy" is a song by English singer Robbie Williams, released in April 2001 as the fourth single from his third studio album, Sing When You're Winning (2000). The song reached number 10 in the United Kingdom and entered the top 40 in several other countries. It was not released in Australia until 2002, when it peaked at number 53 on the ARIA Singles Chart. The music video for the single was presented in animation. It featured a cartoon facsimile of Williams always on the run in search of love. There is a second, raunchier version of the video depicting animated nudity and sex.
Mary Ruth Maxted, known professionally as Mary Millington from 1974 onwards, was an English model, call girl and pornographic actress. Her appearance in the short softcore film Sex is My Business led to her meeting magazine publisher David Sullivan, who promoted her widely as a model and featured her in the 1977 softcore comedy Come Play With Me, which ran for a record-breaking four years at the same cinema.
Carole Boston Weatherford is an American author and critic. She has published over 50 children's books, primarily non-fiction and poetry. The music of poetry has fascinated Weatherford and motivated her literary career. She has won multiple awards for her books, including the 2022 Coretta Scott King Award for Author for her book Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre. As a critic, she is best known for her controversial criticism of Pokémon character Jynx and Dragon Ball character Mr. Popo.
David Sullivan is a British businessman and former pornographer. From 1986 to 2007, he owned the Daily Sport and Sunday Sport, which he sold for £40 million.
Fiesta was a British softcore adult magazine published monthly by Galaxy Publications Limited. It was a sister publication of Knave magazine, launched two years later.
Simon Willard was a celebrated American clockmaker. Simon Willard clocks were produced in Massachusetts in the towns of Grafton and Roxbury, near Boston. Among his many innovations and timekeeping improvements, Simon Willard is best known for inventing the eight-day patent timepiece that came to be known as the gallery or banjo clock.
Knave was a long-running British softcore adult magazine that was published monthly by Galaxy Publications Limited. Originally launched in 1968 by the photographer Russell Gay, it was the upmarket sister publication of Fiesta magazine. Mary Millington modelled for the magazine in 1974, prior to her exclusive signing to work for David Sullivan's magazines.
Club is a monthly American pornographic magazine which is a spin-off publication of the United Kingdom's Club International. Club features sexually oriented articles, video reviews, and pictorials that include hardcore pornography, masturbation, dildo usage, and lesbian sex.
George Michael Sinclair Kennedy CBE was an English music critic and author who specialized in classical music. For nearly two decades he was the chief classical music critic for both The Daily Telegraph (1986–2005) and The Sunday Telegraph (1989–2005). A prolific writer, he was the biographer of many composers and musicians, including Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Barbirolli, Mahler, Strauss, Britten, Boult and Walton. Other notable publications include writings on various musical institutions, the editing of music dictionaries as well as numerous articles for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the subsequent Grove Music Online.
Come Play with Me is a 1977 British softcore pornographic film, starring Mary Millington and directed by George Harrison Marks. Its cast list contains many well-known British character actors who were not previously known for appearing in such films. The film is regarded by many as the most successful of the British sex comedies of the 1970s. It ran continuously at the Moulin Cinema in Great Windmill Street, Soho, London for 201 weeks, from April 1977 to March 1981, which is listed in the Guinness Book Of World Records as the longest-running screening in Britain. A blue plaque on the former cinema's site commemorates this.
In the United Kingdom, pornography is regulated by a variety of laws, regulations, judicial processes and voluntary schemes. Pornographic material generally has to be assessed by regulators or courts to determine its legality. British censorship laws with regard to pornography have often been some of the most restrictive in Western Europe.
Tramp Press is a publishing company founded in Dublin in 2014 by Lisa Coen and Sarah Davis-Goff. It is an independent publisher that specialises in Irish fiction. The company is named after John Millington Synge's tramp, a reference to the bold outsider.
Madhur Anand is a Canadian poet and professor of ecology and environmental sciences. She was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario and lives in Guelph, Ontario.
Mikhail Izrailevich Armalinsky is a Russian poet, writer, blogger, and publisher of erotica. He caused scandal and outrage within Russian literary circles, following publication in 1986 of a pornographically toned diary, ostensibly by Alexander Pushkin. This led to him being described as "The Pushkin pornographer".
Gold Star Publications was a British magazine publisher co-owned by David Gold with his brother Ralph. It included printing and distribution businesses including porn titles, with magazines Whitehouse, Rustler and Raider.
