'London guests staying hate it. Keeps them awake all night they complain. The bleating in the utter stillness. I heal with it, as you did.'

This epistolary collection finds Bogarde at his most honest and touching, engaging in conversation with a woman he has never met and whose only interest in him comes from the simple fact that he now happens to live in a house that she once owned. These letters provide an insight into the wit and intelligence of a great man without the stifling constraints of other literary forms. It presents us with a platform and a relationship that allows...

After completing work on Visconti's Death in Venice, the celebrated actor seeks a refuge from 20 years of 'continual motion'. This dream of a peaceful retreat materialises itself in the form of a neglected farmhouse in the South of France. However, before he is rewarded with the calm he craves, he is forced to endure the relative evils of dying olive trees and the rampaging mistral. We are exposed to the struggles and intricacies in trying to change the very fabric of one's existence. In this pursuit of the tranquil, Bogarde manages to portray the simplest of issues in the most delicate...

Filling in the gaps left between his previous memoirs, as well as highlighting new episodes, Backcloth explores the patterns of pleasure and pain that have made up Bogarde's extraordinary life. It is based on personal letters, notebooks and diaries, covering many aspects of a celebrated life. We share experiences from his family home in Hampstead through to his farmhouse retreat in Provence. This memoir highlights the people, emotions and episodes that made him into the man that so many loved. It is an especially searching and intimate volume of his acclaimed memoirs. Written with...

Employing both the language and lucidity of the young boy that he evokes, the actor turned author, Dirk Bogarde, presents us with a charming recollection of his childhood. From 1927 to 1934 he lived in a remote cottage in the Sussex Downs with his sister Elizabeth and their strict but loving nanny, Lally. For the children it was an idyllic time of joy and adventure: of gleaning at the end of summer, of oil lamps and wells, of harvests and harvest mice in the Great Meadow.

With great sensitivity and poignancy, this memoir captures the sounds and scents, the love and gentleness that...

During his many reconnaissance missions in Europe and the Far East, the young Bogarde experienced the terror of enemy attack and the horror of its aftermath, together with the intense camaraderie and bitter humour of the battlefield. He also felt, like countless others, a feeling of utter hopelessness at the war's end, when, as suddenly as the fighting had stopped, these youthful, but hardened comrades-in-arms were dispersed to find their feet in a traumatised world.

Less than a year after demob no one could have been more astonished to find himself starring in his third feature...