“... 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 ...”

“... which the emotion appears to be hidden, to lurk mysteriously in the space between the words. The search for pure accuracy in her poems forced her to watch the world helplessly, as though there were nothing she could do. The statements she made in her poems seem always distilled, put down on the page – despite the simplicity and the tone of casual ...”

“... among the privileged – the CIA under Obama set up a recruiting office at the Miami Beach Gay Pride parade. Overt racism and homophobia had become taboo, even as imprisonment or premature death removed 1.5 million black men from public life. Diversification and multiculturalism among upwardly mobile, college-educated elites went together with mass ...”

“... so coolly or callously, and so at odds with what we know of his own quiet lifestyle that led Peter Gay to describe Burckhardt as an intellectual voluptuary. The founders of the new history may have seen a foreshadowing in Burckhardt, but it was Durkheim they modelled themselves on. The latter’s objective approach, which demanded a hard society of hard social ...”

“... has a compass at all it’s fixed permanently on self-seeking.23 February. I go to the chemist in search of Collis Browne, which Boots choose no longer to sell, though why no one can explain. Depending on what one wants, the chemist has always been a theatre of embarrassment, though never so much as when our local pharmacy was on the corner of Sharpleshall ...”

“... Similarly, no one who once uses the recently-advertised OED in machine-readable form with all its search and cross-reference facilities will want to be confined to the printed volumes. Chadwyck Healey have advertised for imminent sale a database comprising texts of all the poetry listed in the NCBEL. It cannot be long before all literature in English is ...”

“... social occasions. But I do believe, as Simon evidently does too, that diaries, whether grave or gay, are worth keeping for their immediacy as a record. My grandmother kept one before and during the early part of the Second World War, and before I deposited it with Newcastle University I read through it at a stretch. What was extraordinary was that I started ...”

“... agony of Christ on the cross. Nor was it all cycling. I stood, with knots of people, on the Rue Gay-Lussac, and applauded Marcel Cerdan as he was driven past at a royally deliberate pace. I was taken to a chic bar in order to catch a glimpse of the patron, the legendary Georges Carpentier. I saw young boys, in Saint Malo, flinging themselves into Boyhood of ...”

“... yet more marked in The Quattro Cento, an angular scurry round the back corners of Italian art in search of a counter-Florentine account of the 15th century, its fitfully dazzling prose shot with anxious glances over the shoulder at ancestor authorities: a book for which the phrase ‘desperately clever’ could have been coined.) Referring for method to the ...”

“... across Europe to end up in Liverpool. His wife, Elizabeth, no less enterprising, left Ukraine in search of work, also ending up in Liverpool, which is where they met and married. The plan was to emigrate to New York, going by way of Dublin, but when they got to Dublin they decided to settle there. I never knew Abram, who died before I was born, but after we ...”

“... without being shamed. It’s not that they’re seeking an artsy androgynous ideal, nor are they gay men who want to look dramatically feminine: many are heterosexual men who want to enjoy the flawless look and glowing skin associated with femininity; sometimes they like to cross-dress too. The change of aesthetics is a clear sign of a disembedding from ...”

“... such as Ralph Peer (who found Fiddlin’ John Carson) turned their gaze to Southern cities in search of raw talent. ‘Country’ at the time was just string-band music: songs played on violins, guitars and banjos. It didn’t have a name yet and, even in the South’s most segregated pockets, it didn’t always respect racial boundaries. It was a steam ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... place. At a Binary Defiance workshop held at the 2015 True Colours Conference, an annual event for gay and transgender youth at the University of Connecticut, the following were listed on the blackboard: non-binary, gender queer, bigender, trigender, agender, intergender, pangender, neutrois, third gender, androgyne, two-spirit, self-coined, genderfluid. In ...”

“... stories Bowles joined Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin as one of the pioneers of gay fiction in America. Williams read ‘The Delicate Prey’ while accompanying Bowles to Tangier on the SS Vulcania in December 1948. ‘It was a stormy crossing, and I stayed in my cabin most of the time,’ Bowles said. I also wrote a story during the ...”