"Take two shots," was the standard order to London Sunday Dispatch photographers, "one for England, the other for Ireland." In a sizzling heat wave, the photographers were out on the bathing-suit beat, and while the average British daily carried enough cheesecake for a Berlin banquet, editions exported to Ireland featured proper young women in street clothes. There was no alternative: Roman Catholic Ireland's law and custom have long forced Irish newspapers to adopt one of the most rigorous self-censorships of any free press in the world.
The taboosstemming mostly from public moral attitudecenter on indecency, concentrated coverage of crime, advocacy of birth...