Michael Davidson’s memoir begins from a declaration that, in 1962, was both startlingly frank and legally dangerous.

The result is a memoir that's both candid and ethically difficult. Davidson writes with considerable charm about friendship, war, journalism, sexuality and the succession of places and people that formed him, while describing desires and relationships that cannot simply be absorbed into a contemporary narrative of queer liberation. The book matters partly because it refuses the sanitising categories later applied to queer history: it preserves a voice produced under criminalisation, secrecy and social danger, but also demands that the reader distinguish historical candour from moral innocence. Arthur Koestler reportedly named it among the best books of 1962; its endurance lies less in agreement than in the unnerving completeness with which Davidson makes a compromised life intelligible. 

Quartet Books, 1977 paperback edition, with foreword by James Cameron. Light rubbing, handling wear and mild creasing to covers; pages clean and binding sound.