1/7) "'The Beatles' are four pleasant-voiced pop singers, for whom foolish girls swoon over in crowds – as crowds always do when their idols appear."

The #LGBTQ Diaries of Mr Lucas - March 5, 1964 (Thursday - partial entry):

https://www.facebook.com/mrlucas1927/posts/1816118508565436

2/7) "There's little good in all this adolescent nonsense and less harm. Yet Dr Soper, the Methodist, now thunders, 'If Beatlemania typifies Western society, then with all their faults give me the Soviets' and goes on for five paragraphs to denounce this shock-haired quartet."

3/7) "The crime, violence, greed, selfishness of the West, does not shock this cleric so much. It is a parcel of silly girls going into squealing hysteria that he regards as worse than 'all the faults' of the Russian empire."

4/7) "These 'faults', the concentration camps, firing squads, closed churches, the intellectual slavery, the subjugated Baltic and Balkan peoples, are all well known to Dr Soper, but he minds them less than the fondness of teenage crowds for their guitar-and-drum playing heroes."

5/7) "This is rather sinister."

6/7) "Old men full of irritable envy of the young are pitiable; when they spit their venom from pulpits they become dangerous. "

7/7) "In men like Dr Soper, one suspects a deep unconscious yearning for authoritarian rule for any regime that with whip and truncheon will banish the pleasures they hate."