“... the only game in town. When, you wonder, will someone new turn up? If it’s true – as a famous gay male writer has suggested – that there are really only 500 people in the world and after a while one has slept with most of them, then the sapphic dating pool has got to be even smaller: eight or ten perhaps, 12 or 15 at most. It’s ...”

“... to a trolley for a lethal injection, he actually assisted the executioners in their hour-long search for a viable vein in which to place the lethal catheter. (He thought they were doctors trying to cure him.)This, coupled with Clinton’s ostentatious membership of an all-white golf-club, strikes me as a more pressing issue of morals and ...”

“... footage shot on the Old Kent Road during the 1970s shows children on the streets, and early in my search, I used to scan the little groups playing by building sites or standing at bus stops, the children under the advertising hoardings or walking past the shops, to see if any of them resembled a blond-haired boy in a photo on a family tree, a boy that a ...”

“... deranger of the senses, or ‘Hallucinogenic Poet’; and, as the lover of Paul Verlaine, the ‘Gay Poet’. Mason means myths, I think, in the sense of true stories which become more than the sum of their parts. The problem with them all, he believes, is that they ‘put too plain a face on the poems’, which are ‘vessels of indeterminacy’ and ...”

“... as a single woman, published in the St James Chronicle in 1763, was entitled ‘Imagination’s Search after Happiness’. It therefore seemed natural to her to use her talents to charm her distant new husband, ‘so Instead of Dressing showily, or behaving usefully – I sate at home and wrote Verses.’ But Thrale wasn’t impressed and Johnson stepped ...”

“... in a dramatic week for freedom in America. The Supreme Court had ruled five to four in favour of gay marriage; at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Obama had drawn on the cadences of the Southern black church, in perhaps the most powerful speech of his presidency, and invited his audience to join him in singing ‘Amazing ...”

“... he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the morning. They’re wrong. I nearly died in an ...”

“... in the field. With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his colleague Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The ...”

“... moments of narrative tension, which then lodge the book’s apparently minor characters – a gay junkie, a celebrity profiler, a flailing PR executive – more securely in the reader’s memory. People who would only be allowed bit roles in a longer, intricately plotted novel kaleidoscopically emerge as figures in their own right. Egan exposes her ...”

“... ever more awkward and dangerous situations – preferably involving ‘sinister’ men – in her search for ‘my own little idea of salvation’; Mrs Copperfield, on a trip to Panama that’s in the loosest sense a parody of the Bowles honeymoon, leaves her husband for a local prostitute called Pacifica. Though there’s an apparent parallel between the ...”

“... leaves little doubt that dancing has long been the target of state repression, especially when gay or Black people are doing it. The founding legend of rave concerns the ‘Ibiza Four’: the DJs Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, who in 1987 went on holiday to Ibiza, took Ecstasy under the stars at the open-air club ...”

“... She stopped what she was doing and looked at him. ‘We need another fridge,’ she said. They search through newspaper advertisements for something they can afford. Sandy sees that they must go to a type of auction sale that her husband feels to be demeaning. She turns away to prepare a meal, and when she looks at him again it is to find that not only the ...”

“... as an active revolutionary. His politics remained implacably Republican, but he had embarked on a search for intellectual and personal fulfilment, both of which eluded him. Post-revolutionary Ireland was never comfortable with him, nor he with it: a central theme of Richard English’s absorbing study is O’Malley’s ambivalence towards Irish pieties, and ...”

“... melodrama and bathos were always close at hand. Born into a family of astonishing dysfunction (a gay father, a brittle and over-protective mother, the deplorable and never-to-be-forgiven birth-name Vivian, alcoholic and suicidal siblings) Chambers could well have become a drifter if he had not signed on at Columbia University and been noticed by Mark Van ...”

“... come from?’ For a fleeting moment, two years later, as they manned the barricades of the rue Gay-Lussac, daubed their slogans on walls across the Left Bank and engaged the enemy in the Paris streets, the Situationists understandably thought of themselves as the avatars of high postwar revolutionary theory. Since 1968 the literature on the Situationist ...”