AS FOR Sir Theobald Mathew, the Director of Public Prosecutions,
his evidence made that of Sir Frank Newsam sound sensible, open and reasonable. It reached its nadir when he solemnly announced that when he was recently requested —not, strangely enough, by the Home Office— to prosecute Ulysses, he declined on the grounds that 'I regard this book as totally unreadable? This should be placed alongside the evidence of one Inspector Macleod, whose great abilities as a literary critic have yet be signalled in the book pages of the Observer or Encounter, but whose job it is to trot round booksellers with a list of works considered obscene. 'I am told,' said Sir John Nott-Bower, Chief of the Metropolitan Police, 'that every one on this list except Lolita is of the really filthy category and has no artistic merit.' But by whom is Sir John told this? Why, evidently by Inspector Macleod, who, asked whether the 'really filthy category' with `no artistic Merit' included The Ginger Man, replied, 'Yes. I have seen that book; it is very dirty.' There has been nothing like it since the Censor of Plays, in the nineteenth century, announced that he did not ban Ibsen's plays because they were too absurd to do any harm.
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