the Dublin novelist Mary Manning, and fellow northerner, the socialist Jack White, in forming The Secular Society of Ireland. "Convinced that clerical domination in the community is harmful to advance", the society sought "to establish in this country complete freedom of thought, speech and publication, liberty for mind, in the widest toleration compatible with orderly progress and rational conduct". Among other things it aimed to terminate ”the clerically-dictated ban on divorce”, “the Censorship of Publications Act” and “the system of clerical management, and consequent sectarian teaching, in schools.” This was at a time of heightened clerical militancy and as soon the meeting place of the Society (from which it distributed the British journal The Freethinker) was exposed, it had to shift to private houses outside of Dublin. In 1936 Johnson and the other members wound the society up and donated the proceeds to the government of the beleaguered Spanish Republic. Johnston had become a recognised man of the left: in 1930 he had joined the Irish Friends of Soviet Russia, and though never a party member, until as late as the 1950s he professed faith in a communist future. During the Second World War he served as a BBC war correspondent, reporting from El Alamein, through the Italian campaign, to Buchenwald and Hitler's Berghof. For this he was awarded an OBE, a Mention in Despatches, and the Yugoslav Partisans Medal. He then became Director of Programmes for the television service. Johnston later moved to the United States and taught at Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and other universities. He kept extensive diaries throughout his life, now deposited in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, and these together with his many articles and essays give a distinctive picture of his times and the people he knew. Another archive of his work is held at the library of Ulster University at Coleraine. He received honorary degrees from the University of Ulster and Mount Holyoke College and was a member of Aosdána. Denis and actress Shelah Richards were the parents of Jennifer Johnston, a respected novelist and playwright, and a son, Micheal. His second wife was the actress Betty Chancellor, with whom he had two sons, Jeremy and Rory. Critical acclaim Hilton Edwards, who first directed The Old Lady Says "No!", said that the script "read like a railway guide and played like Tristan and Isolde." Reviewing The Moon in the Yellow River