It's hilarious how indifferently he tends to them while they consume enormous amounts of sugar and cause havoc. I think I’ll make my way back to town and spend the night in a coffee bar listening to the juke-box. redis

Acerbic yet wistful, indecent, caffeinated, raw, suddenly profound – a hip flask of a novel, brimful of phenomenal lines. To come across such a lucid, compelling and tragic time capsule of working class gay life, so well preserved and perfunctoral of modern times, is really quite a marvel. The display is a series of extracts from the novel, taking in cruising on Dean Street, taking coffee at Lyons, dropping by jazz clubs off Tottenham Court Road, offering a portrait of Leda’s gay working-class Romany life in a Soho of the 1950s and 60s. Love, Leda’ follows our misanthropic eponymous lead skirt the streets of Soho, borrowing money off friends, random hookups and traipsing around London with no purpose or goal. A lot of the narrative is taken up by long passages where Leda merely pontificates on the meaning of life, coming out with quasi-philosophical lines such as ‘It’s hard for me to believe that I exist and at the same time to accept my delusions’.

Sit down near the window and I’ll bring you a coffee,’ says the boy and makes his way to a small counter. Leda is unattached to a home, job or partner but finds moments of comfort and intimacy among a community of gay men and divorced women. Make yourself at home, but close the door if you go out,’ he says quietly, and closes the door on himself. The book itself is quite short and just about manages to not overstay its welcome; indeed, I found the majority of it propulsively readable. I hand him a ten-shilling note, he knocks and the door opens, but it’s on a chain and one can see a man, two inches wide and five feet tall.

Because their guilt and self-pity is a sickness inbred in them, draining them; so they have to numb themselves with hollow sexuality and the din of the jukebox; inflate their shallow little egos into seeing themselves as supreme men of tomorrow, which they’ll never be. In another, he derives an unconcealed pleasure from the pain he causes, even with Vaseline, after which he apologies to the man, a stranger after all, without much gusto.On the surface, Love, Leda is a straightforward narrative stroll around 1960s Soho, taking in the sights and the characters of the age in variously humorous, awkward and sinister encounters. A must read for anyone with an interest in queer British literature as it offers a near new opinion on an important period in queer history. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession - one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction. I can see my white socks, just below grubby knees, with their rhythmic pattern of holes ascending like the bubbles in lemonade.