“... would T.S. Eliot have made of that, his dear ghost having just survived seductions, blue poetry, gay short stories). In his prize-winning Mind Forg’d Manacles of 1987, Porter examined the history of madness in England from the Restoration to the end of the 18th century, and established that madness was a much-discussed subject, and a relatively common ...”

“... loved platonically. In fact, it would be no serious distortion to say that there is only one good gay here, and lots of bad gays. Possibly homosexuality is an extra twist of the thumbscrew Burgess customarily applies to his leading characters. Perhaps it is necessary that Toomey should be a Catholic, and a lapsed one, but lapsed for some reason other than ...”

“... and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears as co-host with Britten. The stickiness – clearly a source of great amusement to Coldstream and Spender – lay in the tensions between the lifestyles of the people concerned, and the frustration felt by Auden and Isherwood – naturally dominant ...”

“... barons). The trouble was no one in the actual Labour Party remotely resembled him. By this point, Peter Mandelson was communications director, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and Neil Kinnock – scarred by having to defend unilateral disarmament in the 1987 general election – was on the long march to respectability and another defeat in ...”

“... not as self-motivated as himself, then became the disciple of the über-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who believes that ‘freedom and democracy’ are not ‘compatible’, that it was a mistake for women to be given the right to vote, and that the future lies in colonies in space and on the oceans, free from government repression. Thiel hired Vance ...”

“... and benefits, Lord Hollick, chairman of United News and Media, to advise on industrial policy, and Peter Jarvis, Whitbread chief executive, who was asked to head the Low Pay Commission, charged with setting the rate for the planned legal minimum wage. In previous Labour administrations, it was trade-union leaders like Ernest Bevin and Frank Cousins who were ...”

“... it. The Modern American Novel is an ‘Opus Book’ (General Editors – Keith Thomas, Alan Ryan, Peter Medawar) intended for students. The Literature of the United States is a volume in the Macmillan History of Literature. But no Oxford undergraduate could get by with generalities like this aperçu of Professor Walker’s: ‘Jewish novels are ...”

“... a transvestite in a cultural representation,’ she writes, ‘signals a category crisis.’ So in Peter Pan, the subject of one of the most telling chapters in the book, ‘category crises are everywhere,’ – crises about class, gender and the differences between adults and children. This simple point, that one category always suggests another, leads ...”

“... feed it to Oscar de la Renta’s dogs. Here’s Matthew Tinkcom. ‘Camp is the alibi for gay-inflected labour to be caught in the chain of value-coding within capitalist political economies... I would suggest that Camp is more productively seen in relation to what it says about bourgeois representation (and its tendency to exclude gays) than in ...”

“... at the time, was an obvious possibility. He was known to have been friends with the brazenly gay and immoderate Burgess, who had lived for a time in Philby’s house on Nebraska Avenue in Washington. But MI6 found it hard to believe that Philby could be a Soviet agent. He had been talked of as a future head of the service – the next M – and as ...”

“... nonsense: ‘How much further does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!’ Peter Collier decides on something more clinical: ‘How much more sharply suffering probes the psyche than does psychology!’ I don’t have a better suggestion, but I like to think of Proust as trusting his tautology: suffering is not different from ...”

“... the perspective of an adult, and to assume that Gorey did too. Yet, as his occasional collaborator Peter Neumeyer remarked: ‘Of all the people I’ve known nobody has been less interested in children.’ He had no memory of Gorey ever even using the word ‘child’.What Gorey understood was not children, but the perspective of childhood and its lack of ...”

“... private backrooms in coffee houses, where groups could get together for gambling, or sometimes for gay sex, out of sight of the law. The association with licence has never quite gone away. In 1963, Mark Birley insisted that his new club, Annabel’s, ‘must smell of exclusivity and sex’. Paula Yates posed naked in the saloon of the Reform Club.The ...”

“... president of the National Union of Students; political adviser to Barbara Castle and then Peter Shore (there are shrewd portraits of both); local government (he was elected to the old Inner London Education Authority and became its deputy leader); Labour candidate, first in a hopeless seat, then the safe Labour seat of Blackburn, which he inherited ...”

“... of) his poems more accessible and ostensibly more frank: he now writes plainly about being gay. But these may not be profound differences. The radical problem for Merrill was the trickiness of self-representation. In the early part of his career, he simply froze before the lyric ‘I’. What enabled him, later on, to use it freely and with ...”