Wildeblood was sentenced to eighteen months for homosexual offences, along with Lord Montagu and Major Michael Pitt-Rivers. The other two men were set free after turning Queen's Evidence.In this book, first published in 1955, Peter Wildeblood tells the story of his childhood and schooldays, his war service and university days, his life as a journalist, his arrest, trial and imprisonment, and finally his return to freedom. In its honesty and restraint it is eloquent testimony to the inhumanity of the treatment of homosexuals in Britain only a generation ago.Probably the first book on homosexuality to reach a mass audience in Britain, Against the Law had a direct influence on the Wolfenden Committee, whose Report in 1957 recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private be legalised, proposals which were finally passed into law in 1967.

    But the book is still of great value for the study of Lesbian poetry since it contains not only texts of most of the longer and more informative pieces, but also translations, commentaries, and explanatory essays. The primary purpose is to determine what may be said with reasonable certainty about the lives and literary achievements of the two poets, and to show how much they contribute to our understanding of the social and political conditions of the time.