“... gets work as an unpaid backstage dogsbody and promptly falls for Meredith Potter, the theatre’s gay director. Frustrated by his indifference, which she can’t fathom (she has never come across homosexuality), she turns instead to O’Hara, an ageing actor brought in to play Captain Hook in the forthcoming production of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... first success. When I met Jeanette she was working as the women’s editor at Brilliance Books, a gay publishing house that received funding from the GLC and was based on Clerkenwell Green, near where I lived. She poured a lot of energy into the job. She was efficient and didn’t mind hard work. She was helpful. When the two men who ran the press, Roy ...”

“... and learned to draw, and through another of the floating population at his parents’ home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender of Horizon, Craxton found a friend, an indulgent patron and a way into the avant-garde. He had a narrow brush with conscription, from which ...”

“... course, which was a burden on everybody, despite the cartoons and all that guff, the play starring Peter O’Toole. Bernard was a nasty, jealous misogynist who found a perfect safe house at the Colony: so many of its regulars were nasty that your average woman-hater struggled to stand out. (He was also a ponce who stole people’s returns from the betting ...”

“... who was pacing on the verge of the Mall (as of life), conscious of an unfitness to mingle with the gay company in it?’ They met finally in March on Birdcage Walk, almost two years after their correspondence began.Lady Bradshaigh, ‘middle-aged, middle-sized, a degree above plump, brown as an oak wainscot’, was born Dorothy Bellingham into an established ...”

“... drill-sergeant reference lends support to James Harding’s portrait of Agate as a straight-acting gay, addicted to guardsmen. However, we now have some idea of Olivier’s effect upon the Old Vic’s audience, that evening, and we expect Agate to defend the performance against calumny. This he does, quite vividly, after a near-scholarly account of other ...”

“... a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of kindness as much as weariness. The killing of Drollet, the imprisonment of Christian and Cheyenne’s subsequent suicide left Brando a ...”

“... sentences in Hillbilly Elegy is ‘I’ll never forget the time I convinced myself that I was gay.’ Before becoming a Catholic, he’d been both a ‘devoted convert’ to Young Earth Creationism (‘I learned about millennialist prophecy and convinced myself that the world would end in 2007’) and an atheist who revered Sam Harris and Christopher ...”

“... 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 ...”