FOR NEARLY 60 YEARS Mr George Lucas led a double life. A mild-mannered civil servant by day, by night he was a fixture of London’s colourful underground gay scene – a twilight world of petty crime, louche pubs and public toilets. He was also an obsessive diary writer.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Mr Lucas had a passionate and fraught affair with a rent boy associate of the Kray twins known as Irish Peter, one of many men Mr Lucas paid for sex. Together, Irish Peter and Mr Lucas represent the spectrum of gay criminality prior to the partial decriminalisation of gay sex in 1967.

When Mr Lucas died in 2014, he left his diaries to the journalist Hugo Greenhalgh. The Diaries of Mr Lucas combines Mr Lucas’s deliciously indiscreet recollections of a life spent sometimes literally in the shadows with Greenhalgh’s commentary – this is gay London like it’s never been seen before.