Cleared for Take-off, by Dirk Bogarde (Penguin, £5.99 in UK)

This is the final volume in Bogarde's autobiography, opening in the dying stages of the second World War, from which shortly …

This is the final volume in Bogarde's autobiography, opening in the dying stages of the second World War, from which shortly after he was "demobbed" as an Army signal man. Bogarde, a rather solitary man by nature, hated the lack of privacy of military life, and even while making Death in Venice on location he lay low in his hotel when he wasn't filming. He was badgered by Foreign Office bureaucracy after that film, even warned officially about "going East", though at this stage of his life he had settled in France and saw little of England. The book ends on a dying fall when Bogarde, after the death of his male companion in France, returns joylessly to London to live in a flat, duck newspaper interviews and be awarded honours which he didn't want and which came too late anyway. It sounds sad.