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Peter Parker is the author of biographies of J. R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood, The Old Lie, The Last Veteran, Housman Country and A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners. He edited A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel and Twentieth-Century Writers, is an advisory editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and contributed essays to Britten's Century and Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read. He has written about people, books, art, architecture and gardening for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, and lives in London's East End.
[A] comprehensive two-volume anthology [...] Peter Parker, distinguished author of several related biographies and historical studies, has assembled a remarkable range of materials covering all aspects of this phenomenon, spanning VE Day and the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967 [...] Parker adds drily witty commentary throughout -- Rupert Christiansen * The Telegraph * Extraordinary… fascinating * Alan Hollinghurst * - - Praise for Volume One -- - Quite simply, this book is a work of genius -- Matthew Parris * The Spectator * These beautifully written letters, diary entries and extracts from novels, skilfully edited by Peter Parker, add up to an essential study of postwar gay London life… Some Men in London's second volume, which takes us up to 1967, will be published in September. I'll be counting the days - this is one of the best anthologies I have ever read -- John Self * The Observer * With it’s wide-ranging selection, generous biographical notes and provocative bibliography, Some Men in London is a serious and important contribution to our understanding of Britain up to today -- Fiona Sampson * The Tablet * An intriguing collage of the era’s mood -- Robbie Millen * The Times * An absolutely extraordinary book … a huge collage and anthology of diaries, letters, memoirs, newspaper reports, trial documents, all of this, about actually what life was like for homosexual men in London in the 1940s and the 1950s… It’s amazing, because the collage effect gives you a sense of the extreme complexity of this picture * Dominic Sandbrook * As lively as a novel... a truly vital thing in a world where so many stories have been erased or criminalised * Damien Barr *
