Police investigating the fatal stabbing of the 85-year-old great-grandson of the Victorian poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson this morning arrested a 44-year-old man in West London.

Beryl Hallam Augustine Tennyson, known to his friends as Hallam, was found dead in his bed after police were called to his house in Highgate at 11.20pm on December 21. He had suffered serious head injuries and several stab wounds.

A post-mortem examination at St Thomas’ Hospital mortuary gave cause of death as stab wounds to the neck.

DCI Tony Nash described the killing as a brutal attack on an elderly and vulnerable man, and appealed for anyone who had seen him in his last few days alive to contact the police.

"Despite his years Mr Tennyson was a lively individual who continued to lead a full and active life," he added.

Mr Tennyson, a retired BBC executive who was educated at Eton, invited men back to his flat in Crouch End up to three times a week. A list of those believed to have been regular visitors has been provided by a former boyfriend and detectives are trying to trace them.

Relatives described Mr Tennyson, who has two children and seven grandchildren, as "a colourful character" whose behaviour concerned his family.

His daughter-in-law, Janice, who is married to his son, Jonathan, a professor of physics at University College London, said: "Normally you worry about your teenage children, but we were worried about him. We are all absolutely devastated. We were all very close to him, particularly our children, who shared with him a love of drama."

She said that he had been found by his former partner when he returned from watching a football match on Wednesday.

Mr Tennyson wrote about his homosexuality in an article seven years ago. "Lord Tennyson, my great-grandfather, lived from 1809 to 1892 and would no doubt be absolutely horrified by me," he said. "He was a sexual prude, whereas I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to sex."

He was married for 30 years to Margo, a German Jewish refugee, despite having told her that he was a homosexual, a preference he discovered during the Second World War, in which he refused to fight.

"I told Margo before we married that I was homosexual, but she did not know what that meant," he wrote. "I explained it to her, but she said she didn’t mind. Looking back, we were terribly rational about it.

"I went to see a psychiatrist who told me, quite ridiculously, that it was just a passing phase and that the love of a good woman could change me.

"Despite my homosexuality, we became engaged in 1942, and three years later we married. My two brothers had been killed in the war and I had a tremendous urge to have children, to carry on the family line. I knew that I was very capable of having sexual relations with women, in fact before Margo I had already slept with two women, and as Margo accepted me for what I was, I decided to go ahead with the marriage.

"Margo and I had a tremendously happy marriage and our sexual relations were adequate. Indeed, my wife thought they were more than adequate."

Mr Tennyson wrote a biography in 1984 in which he listed a string of homosexual liaisons. He wrote: "There has inevitably been a good deal of waste. Instead of spending hours haunting public lavatories, or other pick-up points, I might have read several books as long as War and Peace — I might even have written one."

He also wrote about being spat at, assaulted and robbed during his hunt for companionship. After the autobiography, A Haunted Mind, was published, he received a fan letter from a man 13 years his junior and the two became lovers.

Mr Tennyson was named after his great grandfather’s close friend, the writer Arthur Hallam. The death of Hallam prompted the elegiac, mournful sequence In Memoriam, which was published in 1850, the year that Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate by Queen Victoria.

Today the Metropolitan Police said in a statement that a man was being questioned at a West London police station in connection with the murder.

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