More Cock-Eyed Optimism: The Second Memoir: The Sixties. This item is unavailable.More Cock-Eyed Optimism: The Second Memoir: The Sixties

"More Cock-Eyed Optimism" - "The Sixties", is a sequel to Nigel Quiney's first memoir - "A Cock-Eyed Optimist".
This latest volume conjures up that special decade of Swinging London and documents his leaving home and starting work in London's Paper Trade. Embracing his teenage life in gay London his stories are touching, hilarious and sometimes sad in his world of promiscuity where a gay man began to be able to enjoy a new-found freedom after the change of law brought about by the Wolfenden Report. Nigel Quiney's travels to Europe, North Africa and journeys driving across the USA are fascinating adventures of their time, when few were able to indulge in such trips. Later, in business, Quiney's creative instincts were put to good use as he became a successful designer of giftwrapping paper with designs based more on fashion than what had been available previously.
This book honestly and intimately paints a picture of this period and is a page-turning follow-up to his first memoir.

For a touching and searingly honest disclosure of growing up gay in London, Nigel Quiney's two memoirs record the fascinating life of a gay man born in South London just before World War 11. In the first memoir "A Cock-Eyed Optimist", he paints a touching and evocative picture of how he and his family survived the blitz in south London, and being evacuated to a country boarding school to avoid V2 rockets. His realisation that he was gay and his discovery of others like him are presented as stories that sometimes horrify and sometimes are hilariously funny, but always keep the reader entranced. In his late teens, his adventures in Europe paint a picture of places unspoiled by mass tourism and culminate in his three month trip discovering the USA and Mexico at the age of twenty-one.
His second memoir, "More Cock-Eyed Optimism", continues to record his life, now in London in the Swinging Sixties, both personal and his business affairs.
These two volumes are a must for readers interested in this period of London and its gay life.
Both volumes are of both historical and social interest and, as such, are fascinating and informative good reading.