“... in these pains … as one who has found great treasures.’ After her breasts are cut off, St Peter heals them (over her protests) so that she can survive to face new torments. A kind of double vision is required of the spectator: where pagan kings and their minions see only unbearable pain, martyrs experience the invisible power of God. Their legends ...”

“... a 15-year-old, adds wire cheese-cutters and sharpened bicycle chains to the list. ‘In Essex,’ Peter Fleming says in Invasion 1940, ‘an unexpected windfall made possible the formation of a cutlass platoon, 24 strong, under the command of a former naval rating.’ He also tells how ‘four dozen rusty Lee Enfields, relics of some forgotten tableau or ...”

“... a younger man is ruined when he falls in love with the fiancée of Florence’s cocaine-addicted gay son, Nicky. The dramatic tension is enhanced by Coward’s need to evade the censor’s blue pencil (a threat until the 1968 Theatres Act) so that, as Soden puts it, unspeakable attractions ‘shiver beneath the dialogue’. The original audience would have ...”

“... aie? ‘Half the poetry of the 18th century is probably written by him,’ a character says in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton. Yet he appeals equally to defenders and opponents of the canon. Chatterton was convinced of his own talent and ambitious to be recognised as one of the great English poets; but he chose to attract public attention with pastiche ...”

“... Hermann Scherchen, was 17 and studying English at Cambridge. Britten was 24 and this was his first gay love. For the best account of it Evans sends us to John Bridcot’s Britten’s Children. It seems that Wulff was ousted not by a rival lover but by a close friend, Peter Pears. They sailed off to America together, and ...”

“... in 2015, it was mended with the Fresh Start Agreement. The then first and deputy first ministers, Peter Robinson and McGuinness, issued a joint statement signalling ‘our resolve to engender the sea change so longed for by our communities’. The reference was to Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, in which ‘hope and history rhyme’ and there is ‘hope ...”

“... ultimately be judged and defined by what he does.’ A journalist who may be closer to events, Peter Snowdon ends his book on a more equivocal note: ‘If the last four and a half years have been testing for Cameron’s Conservative Party,’ he writes, ‘the next few will be far harder, whether the party wins or loses.’ Not that Snowdon is in any doubt ...”

“... a fiction, but Burn’s inventions run in parallel with the headlines. McGovern’s situation – gay media star exposed to tabloid harassment in hospital – recalls Russell Harty’s, while his fate (savagely attacked by a casual pick-up whose image has been partially captured on a security video) has elements in common with the murders committed by Colin ...”

“... sisters set off to England for the hunting season. Nancy took Bobbie, and Phyllis took her sons Peter and Winkie; they also took horses and a governess or two, and went out with the Pytchley. Nancy met and married Waldorf Astor, who owned the Observer and was MP for Plymouth; his brother John owned the Times. The Astors were so rich that occasionally it ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings of the word also come into play – ‘distinctive features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem ...”

“... love. How to get to grips with ‘Isherwood’ (as he has chosen to address him) was a problem for Peter Parker: something that perhaps explains the 12 years this usually brisk biographer has spent on his task. A main difficulty is that Isherwood (‘I am a camera’) is himself so intent a watcher of things that inspection bounces off him. Intent and also ...”

“... revolutionaries at their remote and unfashionable base in Sloane Square. Coward and Rattigan were gay writers whose subjects and meanings were (under the strictures of stage censorship) necessarily encoded. By contrast, Osborne’s patron at the Royal Court, George Devine, saw his enemy as, in part, a ‘blight of buggery’ in the English theatre, to be ...”

“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... set in 1960, is chauvinism and hypocrisy bingo: the anti-Semitism, the obviously (to us) closeted gay art director Sal, the onslaught of casual and structural sexism experienced by Peggy on her first day as Don’s secretary.* When he’s introduced to her, Pete says: ‘Are you Amish or something? … It wouldn’t be a sin for us to see your legs. If you ...”

“... singing voice until fifty pages in, when she decides to audition for a talent contest at a nearby gay bar. She sang Harold Arlen’s ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’; when she had finished, ‘for a minute the whole room was silent. Then everyone burst into applause.’ She won the competition. Soon she was taken to the Bon Soir nightclub on Eighth Street for an ...”