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“... depends, I suppose, on what you thought of the film Death in Venice. What does? What you think of Dirk Bogarde’s new book An Orderly Man, Chatto, £8.95. Worth it? When you think of what a meal costs, yes it’s worth it. Well-written? Extremely. Like the first two. A postillion Struck by Lighting and Snakes and Ladders. What happened to him? How do ...”

“... whose work remains a set text for any examination on the 20th century. Both Robert Plunket and Dirk Bogarde tell tall tales from Los Angeles, where, as Mr Bogarde says in his foreword, anything can happen and anything and everything does. My Search for Warren Harding, Mr Plunket’s first novel, is described on the ...”

“... print to look at. This enduring darkness is the combined achievement of Losey, Harold Pinter and Dirk Bogarde, but it can’t have been certain from the start that the combination would work, because each of the three specialises in a different, potentially conflicting act. Losey is always a stylist, often mildly baroque, his camera always literally ...”

“... might have enjoyed it in his stead. Osborne as the fourth intern in Doctor in the House, alongside Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Donald Sinden ... Osborne as a Spartan, as a rugby fan, as Dr Watson ... He would, you feel, have snarled a hole in the screen. A Better Class of Person is written with the tautness and power of a well-organised novel. It is a ...”

“... of their dust-jackets, and are, inevitably, affectionate and indulgent towards their subject. As Dirk Bogarde remarked when Croall consulted him about the work in hand, ‘everybody adored him, so the book might make rather flat reading.’ Morley’s title emphasises that his version is authorised, and the implication is that his rival’s is ...”

“... is pictured in A Gentle Occupation in remarkable detail – a feat of memory on Dirk Bogarde’s part. If there are possible inaccuracies – was ‘camp’ ever so flaunted in an Indian Division at the time? – this may not be inadvertent, but the result of processing memory into a novel. And a novel that for all its assurance draws ...”

“... a sizable gulf between the British war films that I had been fed on as a schoolboy (Kenneth More, Dirk Bogarde and Jack Hawkins equipped with Tootal cravats and stiff upper lips against the might of the Nazi war machine) and the often uncritical television documentaries and nostalgic Second World War books that are still produced, as opposed to the ...”

“... the very Victorian restrictions on the lives of gay men in the Sixties. Victim, the film in which Dirk Bogarde plays a married barrister blackmailed because of his affair with a young man, had once seemed merely melodramatic – and hard to reconcile with more usual images of Sixties permissiveness. Now I can see why it is described as ...”

“... on well-oiled wheels through place after place, almost always alone. Whatever. I have heard Dirk Bogarde describe the period between sunset and the failing of the light as l’heure verte. Before the melancholy of the green hour has time to steal upon me, I return to the word-processor. At last, I am ready to tackle the scene between the seducer ...”

“... it accounts for his view of Lowell (‘irresponsible obscurity’) as well as for his praise of Dirk Bogarde (‘irresistible’), Edward Blishen (‘lose no time in starting’ to read him), D.J. Enright (‘a champion of ordinary existence against the whimsies of the over-educated’) and Craig Raine (‘thank goodness, a far cry from The Waste ...”

“... his work can be explained by his concealed passion for men. Clift could be seen as the American Dirk Bogarde, both 1950s poster boys with something to hide. There’s the beguiling possibility that, had he lived, Clift might have taken on roles that drew more directly on his sexual identity, as Bogarde did. In fact ...”

“... but it was the conclusive line. Lady Browning was not satisfied, however; according to her, Dirk Bogarde, playing her husband, said it in a murmur. On his retirement from the Army Boy was appointed Comptroller of Princess Elizabeth’s household and spent the rest of his working life at Court. Daphne Browning was now drawn in whether she liked it ...”

“... would sink. Peter scurried round friends and admirers in the literary and theatrical worlds (Dirk Bogarde, Jane Asher, Lord Faringdon and others) and drummed up another crucial few hundred pounds for the Eye. These people then became ‘shareholders’, though most of them never claimed a dividend. An important influence on Peter was the ...”

“... returning home.My grandmother, as the music swells over the final minutes of Death in Venice, and Dirk Bogarde lies, dying and alone, on a deckchair on the sand: ‘Didn’t we used to have chairs rather like that?’My grandmother, watching a protracted sex scene in a gangster film: ‘And to think I used to enjoy all that sort of thing.’*Because of ...”

“... he was Chinese, ‘that racial discrimination still exists.’ One young army captain (later Dirk Bogarde) recalled, on his arrival in Calcutta in 1945, seeing an Indian porter being beaten by ‘a fat, ginger-haired, moustached, red-faced stocky little major … Screaming. Thrashing at the cringing Indian with his swagger cane … My first sight ...”