2 JANUARY 1959, Page 18

Tile POPULAR PRESS is often criticised for salacity, which the

Beaverbrook papers can—and frequently do—claim not to dabble in. Indeed, last Sunday's fortieth-birthday issue of the Sunday Express quoted Mr. John Gordon's edi- torial memorandum in which he said that 'we want nothing cheap, vulgar, and nasty.' In the same issue Mr. Robert Pitman, in a cheap, vulgar, and nasty attack on Loilia and its London pub- lisher-to-be, devoted a paragraph to a bedroom- keyhole summary of Mr. Weidenfeld's matri-