The announcement came in August 1954. Ed heard about it from Clive, who had heard about it from a contact at the Home Office—a civil servant who was sympathetic to the reform cause and who had let it be known, through the careful channels that such information traveled, that something was happening. "There's going to be a committee," Clive said. He and Ed were in the back room of a pub near Fleet Street, the kind of place where journalists gathered to drink and gossip and forget, for an hour o...