In the original dustsheet. Black cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

Dirk Bogarde was known as the star of more than sixty films and a critically acclaimed author. To a privileged few, however, he was also a prolific, stimulating and treasured correspondent. Bogarde was a secretive man, who destroyed many of his own papers and diaries. Fortunately, the recipients of his letters treasured them, enabling John Coldstream to bring together this fascinating collection of hitherto unpublished material. Bogarde’s letters were invariably frank, gossipy, funny and often malicious. The joy of writing, particularly as he grew older and chose to live in France, was never far away. The letters display the qualities familiar to those who knew the private Bogarde: acute observation, laser-like intelligence, impatience with the foolish, compassion for the needy, a relish for the witty metaphor, and a catastrophic disdain for correct spelling and punctuation.

Review: How do you assess the number of stars to give an anthology of letters? If it is by the emotional effect they have on you and by the feeling of getting to know the writer, then this anthology is excellent. The editor is obviously constrained by the availability of letters, so this limits the period and breadth of them. Before reading them, I advise reading Bogarde’s autobiographies and his authorised biography by John Coldstream, (who edits this anthology), and get to know Bogarde’s life events which will clarify his letters to some extent, though there are footnotes etc to help with the more obscure entries. Sadly, I ‘discovered’ Bogarde, long after his death in 1999, by reading his autobiographies and finding his writing evocative and at times lyrical. I had the impression of a man dedicated to his professions of acting and writing, who was loving to his friends but rather melancholy. However, reading his letters brought the man to life for me, they are full of love, affection, enthusiasm, even ‘joie de vivre’, at times self deprecating perhaps searching for approbation and often there are the foibles of personality which we all have. His books are beautifully written but the letters, unedited, are full of bizarre spelling and punctuation and obviously written as though in conversation. As he writes on p421 “I am me. Wide out in the open”. The letters make you feel you are in conversation with him. They are so immediate that after the last short printed postcard, Coldstream writes “His ashes were scattered at his beloved Clermont”, and it is impossible not to feel the loss of a talented, loving, close friend.

Sir Dirk Bogarde (born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde; 28 March 1921 – 8 May 1999) was an English actor, novelist and screenwriter. Initially a matinée idol in films such as Doctor in the House (1954) for the Rank Organisation, he later acted in art house films, evolving from “heartthrob to icon of edginess”.

In a second career, he wrote seven best-selling volumes of memoirs, six novels, and a volume of collected journalism, mainly from articles in The Daily Telegraph. During five years’ active military duty during World War Two, he reached the rank of major and was awarded seven medals. His poetry has been published in war anthologies; a painting by Bogarde, also from the war, hangs in the British Museum, with many more in the Imperial War Museum.

Having come to prominence in films including The Blue Lamp in the early 1950s, Bogarde starred in the successful Doctor film series (1954–1963). He twice won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for The Servant (1963) and Darling (1965). His other notable film roles included Victim (1961), Accident (1967), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), The Night Porter (1974), A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Despair (1978). He was appointed a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1990 and a Knight Bachelor in 1992.