Columnists get unsolicited free copies of new books, it often seems by almost every post. They frequently come as publishers’ ‘uncorrected proofs’, before publication day. Publicists are of course hoping we might mention the book in something we write, and often there’s a friendly note inviting us to provide a quote for the book-cover’s inside sleeve – ‘Profound, moving and richly funny: best thing I’ve read all year’, that kind of thing.

As attitudes to homosexuality became more accepting, the British public were always one step ahead

You might think these offerings a boon: after all, nobody’s forcing us to respond or even keep the book, meanwhile we have a free book where others would have to pay £20 or more. So call me churlish, but I groan at every new arrival. I suppose if one were hardheaded enough to open the padded envelopes, pull out the books, take an instant decision whether or not to look at each, then consign the rest (most of them) to the bin or the charity shop, then one would be quids in.

But I can’t make myself do that. Each book represents months, usually years, of its author’s life. He or she has lived and breathed this project, it’s their baby, and they’ll be nervously hopeful of a kind review. Often enough there’s a little handwritten note, too, from the actual author, and I wince to see it. The act of throwing somebody’s labour of love in the bin with hardly a glance at its content pains me every time. Yet I just can’t read them all and the truth is I don’t want to.

So when last Saturday another arrived, I unwrapped it with sinking heart. The heart sank further when I read the title on the publisher’s proof. Some Men in London, vol. 1: Queer Life, 1945-1959. Did I really want to read this? I dislike the word ‘queer’ anyway and associate its use (when it’s not meant abusively) with the sort of angry defiance that we in Britain, at least, can surely now put aside. I opened the hefty volume randomly, however, just to get a sense of it, and started to read idly, without even sitting down.

Half an hour later I hadn’t moved: still standing and still reading. Quite simply, this book is a work of genius. Use the word ‘study’ or ‘chronicle’ if you like, but it’s so much more than history, so much more than a series of facts: more, even, than a series of commentaries and judgments. Peter Parker, the self-described ‘editor’ (No! He’s a hunter, an anthologist, a collector of small treasures, a time-travelling magpie) hardly comments at all on what he has found. He does not judge. He does not need to. Beyond an implied wink, an unspoken recoil, a gulp of horror or an unexpressed giggle, Parker only lays it out before us. We can respond as we choose.

His aim? His method? The aim is to remind older readers and show younger ones just how mad, cruel, ridiculous and stupid we British were about homosexuality only a couple of generations ago. This he achieves not by diving into the history of legislation, the statistics of prosecutions, or an anatomy of the movements for reform, but with a seemingly random pot-pourri of what can only be called snippets. Snippets like page 15 ‘other news’ in the Daily Telegraph about a raid on a gay pub, an arrest at a public lavatory; a few paragraphs from a prominent columnist’s musings on a ‘spreading vice’; a remark by a home secretary; a personal attestation given to the 1950s Wolfenden committee investigation; a rueful reflection from Sir Noël Coward (‘there are still a few old ladies in Worthing who don’t know’); reports of a suicide; a pompously moralising editorial in a popular newspaper. Some items are sad, some shocking, a surprisingly large number are simply hilarious… and you never know what’s coming next, a gulp, a tear or a belly-laugh: all of them straws in the wind.

The wind. Over the years I’ve become seized by the idea of the wind in history: the one thing historians struggle to measure or convey. They can mark the milestones, report the great events, tell us what ‘happened’, but (think of accounts of the origins of the first world war) they wrestle hopelessly with getting today’s reader to understand – to feel how it felt at the time to yesterday’s people. A wind that filled those sails. Later generations can reconstruct the rigging and the canvas, but the sails flap idly without the wind. Who can picture, who can recapture, who can report the wind?

Parker does. Anyone who was there at the time will recognise and remember. I was ten when this volume ends, and recall my mother’s agonising about whether to let me play the little boy Louis in a Rhodesian repertory production of The King and I – because the director had been reported in the Rhodesia Herald as having been acquitted of ‘indecent assault’ in a public lavatory. Nobody explained.

Can we draw grand conclusions from this gripping anthology? We can draw two. First, there is the breathtaking velocity of the change in expressed attitudes towards same-sex attraction over six or seven decades since the period this first volume of Some Men in London covers. Remarks that were then just the conventional wisdom read now as absolutely ludicrous.

Secondly, though, you end the book with the unmistakable impression that, as attitudes to homosexuality became steadily more accepting, the British public themselves were always one step ahead of their politicians and news media. MPs (and many were gay) were scared of the newspapers. Newspapers were scared of what they imagined their readers to think. Instead of asking their readers, they should have watched them, lapping up Frankie Howerd, Ivor Novello and Kenneth Williams, and not caring a fig if Noël Coward or John Gielgud were gay.

Parker’s magnificent assemblage of straws in the 1950s wind is published in May. Until then, here’s one publisher’s uncorrected proof that’s going nowhere near my bin.