This is the second volume of Peter Parker’s exhaustively researched, meticulously compiled anthology of writings about gay Londoners between 1945 and the partial decriminalisation of male homosexual acts in 1967. It proves as diverting and distressing as the first.

Many celebrated ‘fellow travellers’ reappear, including the author and editor J R Ackerley, the photographer, designer and diarist Cecil Beaton, the playwright, actor and author Noël Coward and the novelist E M Forster, each providing in diaries and letters informed responses to the often very ill-informed debates in Parliament and the media about the legal status of homosexuality that followed the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957.

The entries can be pithy, catty and direct, though inevitably, in many cases, they weren’t intended for publication. Forster in his ‘Locked Diary’ noted in 1965: ‘I should like to record – and why not here – that during nearly 70 years I have been interested in lustful thoughts, writing,