The high-wire society mover with whom the law has finally caught up is a figure of our times: Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein and also former giants of the British state whom lawyers would prefer us not to name as their actions remain alleged or investigated. Such figures were less familiar when Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy premiered in 1963, although he based it on losers during the Great Depression. Lukewarm reviews also reflected bemusement at an Eastern European protagonist in the US rather than the clenched English Rattigan characters in The Winslow Boy and The Deep Blue Sea.
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