The writer and biographer picks five favourites. His latest work is the acclaimed two-volume anthology “Some Men in London: Queer Life 1945-1959” and “1960-1967”, which came out last year.
Where Nothing Sleeps
Denton Welch, 2005
If there is such a thing as a gay sensibility, Welch was one of its great exemplars. His acute feeling for the texture, minutiae and fragility of life is apparent on every page of this excellent compilation, in which his mostly autobiographical short stories are interspersed with extracts from his journals.
London Labour and the London Poor
Henry Mayhew, 1851
An absolutely extraordinary four-part “cyclopedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great metropolis” in the mid- 19th century. Mayhew based it on countless interviews with a huge variety of “street-folk”, in which one hears the real voices of those who populate Dickens’s novels.
The Raj Quartet
Paul Scott, 1965-75
Don’t believe anyone who tells you these novels aren’t a patch on “The Jewel in the Crown”, the (brilliant) 1984 television adaptation. They are a richly populated and truly remarkable feat of narrative, in which the end of empire is seen from the multiple perspectives of the British and Indian characters caught up in it.
The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Poems, Vols 1-2
W.H. Auden, 2022
I was introduced to Auden’s poems at my prep school because he had taught there. He is the most complex, versatile and rewarding of 20th century poets, and of the many collections of his work, Edward Mendelson’s immaculately edited and annotated two-volume edition is the one to have.
Armadale
Wilkie Collins, 1866
My favourite of all his novels, not least because its extravagantly convoluted plot includes four characters who all have the same name; and in Lydia Gwilt, Collins created the most enjoyably wicked woman in all Victorian literature.