In his book Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Fred Barnes, Naomi Jacob and Arthur Marshall (2001), Paul Bailey details the stories of stage performer Barnes, novelist Jacob, and television personality Marshall, describing how they negotiated in their respectively hostile worlds of early-and mid-twentieth-century England. These "alternate biographies" represent a repeated drive in Bailey's work: to explore the nuances of lives at odds with their surroundings. Whether describing differences of class, nationality, or sexuality, his fiction brings out the details of those points of contact between individuals and society, mapping moments of discomfort and alienation as well as those surprising moments of balance and accommodation. While many of his characters succumb to a suicidal despair, his writing inevitably attends sympathetically to individual lives, creating memorable portraits of both the flamboyant and the everyday.

Paul Harry Bailey was born into a working-class family in Battersea, London, on 16 February 1937. His...