Neil Munro "Bunny" Roger, British socialite, couturier, queer man, and combat veteran of the Second World War, photo taken late 1950s

Bunny liked nursery food (and had perfected a menu somehow consisting of suet and cream in every course), good looks, conversational ping-pong, and paper games. His guests—whether they were film stars such as Laurence Harvey or Stewart Granger (with whom Bunny had had a short—“he’s got the biggest bum I’ve ever seen” —fling), beauties like the fashion models Barbara Goalen and Bronwen Pugh, dancers and painters, John French (at that time the fashion photographer) and his wife, Vere—were always at their brightest and best in Bunny’s house.

His legendary parties, his houses, his dandified approach and outré taste were but a soufflé. They masked an encyclopedic mind, a sense of history, nerves of steel, passionate loyalty, deep patriotism, and the most patrician of values.

Bunny himself was made of burnished metal. Physically very fit—I saw him run up mountains in Scotland, at the summit adjusting his makeup from a compact kept in his sporran—he was also fearless. He’d be the first to pick up a poker and go outside if there was a strange noise. As a captain in the Italian campaign, even if his tent was lined in mauve with gilt chairs, and his army overcoats altered to look like Garbo’s redin-gotes, he was revered by his men for the number of Germans he shot— “some right up the arse” —and after the war refused ever to set foot in Germany. He saw the funny side of it too. After Anzio, while surveying a bombed-out village, he ran into a friend who greeted him: “Bun! What’re you doing here?” Bunny looked at the destruction around them. “Shopping,” he replied. Although appalled and incensed by what he had witnessed during the war, he had the good taste to make light of it. “Now that I’ve shot so many Nazis,” he observed, “Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat.”