‘And what are you going to do next?’ well-intentioned people often ask a writer who has just published a new book. This question usually reduces me to evasive mumbling, but for once I can blithely reply that my next book is already going through the presses. 

I say ‘next book’, but it is in fact the second part of my two-volume anthology Some Men in London, which gives a picture of queer life in the capital from the end of the Second World War to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967. The original intention was to publish it as a single volume, but the huge amount of material that I accumulated over the six years it took to research the subject simply wouldn’t fit into one book, however much we trimmed and stuffed, and so Penguin took the bold decision to issue it in two volumes.

So here I am with another book almost ready to be unleashed a few months after the last one appeared, whereas my publishers usually have to wait six or so years for me to produce simply one. This does mean that there is very little let-up for the writer. Unless