“... 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 ...”

“... she was to be modern she must go beyond Pater and James – let alone Bennett and Wells – in the search for ‘significant form’, and in order to register changes in character and psychology. Writing about Richardson, she noted that she ‘fashioned her sentence consciously’ in order to investigate the psychology of her sex. Woolf recognised that ...”

“... is echoed in later accounts. ‘I believe too much Learning had turn’d his Head, or too deep a Search into the Secrets of Nature.’ She wrote this in exoneration, but others would tell the story of Swift’s last years in a hostile spirit. Indeed, in the biography that followed Pilkington’s, the Earl of Orrery’s Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr ...”

“... leaden monologues with heavy, fetid innuendo about power as ‘an aphrodisiac’. He began to be gay, to be clumsily elegant – even safely and silkily indiscreet – and to seek out the salon life. Isaacson tells the story without fully intending to do so. Take, as Kissinger had to if he was going to cut himself a path, the question of nuclear ...”

“... The film’s success broadened Stiller’s ambitions, and he took Garbo with him to Berlin in search of more lucrative and prestigious contracts for them both. Meanwhile, Garbo’s performance in Gösta Berling caught the attention of G.W. Pabst, who cast her as a virtuous woman forced to the brink of prostitution by poverty in Joyless Street ...”