Status Updates From The Castle: Adventures in a...

Army recruitment depots had been rejecting vast numbers of men … as too physically unfit, underweight, under height, rife with heart disease, flat-footed, with varicose veins and tooth decay.

… Thought leaders of the time agonized over the country's deteriorating manhood. The eugenicists blamed faulty genes … There were calls to round up the 'unfit' and subject them to 'forced sterilisation.

Idealistic notions of British masculinity had been badly punctured by the then-raging Boer War. There were frequent news reports of British soldiers … retreating in panic from a tiny army of inexperienced Boer farmers. But there was something even more humiliating than those stories of cowardice on the battlefield. The fleeing Brits were, it emerged, the minority that had been deemed healthy enough to fight.

Hefner 'preferred that all the windows ... be heavily shaded.’

This, Hefner told Playboy in the 1970s, was the ultimate freedom for a man: In the mansion it is, quite literally, the time of day that you want it to be ... People feel so powerless, not only in relation to what happens in the world around them but ... in their own lives. Well, I don't feel that frustration, because I've taken control of my life.’