“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be non-violent. In the 1960s Margaret Lovatt lived for six months with a young male dolphin called Peter as part of a Nasa project to teach dolphins to speak. The pair grew extremely close. Peter would often get sexually aroused and rub himself against Lovatt, disrupting their language lessons. Eventually Lovatt started to ...”

“... such a carnival spirit.’ In those days of talented amateurs the Eng Lit business was still the Gay Science. Used by Nietzsche, and as a title for his book on criticism by the Victorian reviewer E.S. Dallas, that phrase goes back to the troubadours, beloved of Ezra Pound: and there is a troubadour spirit in both these American poets, the collective spirit ...”

“... than a hundred and fifty pieces extracted from punk fanzines, key texts of pop history (such as Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music and Ice T’s autobiography) and the weekly music press, as well as from more outré authorities on pop music (such as Joe Orton) and a few anti-pop pieces (by Paul Johnson and Richard Hoggart, among others). Liveliest and ...”

“... or partly Jewish background, and thus already semi-outsiders. Two of the most prominent were gay (Wittgenstein and Foucault), one of them (Nietzsche) went mad, while another (Heidegger) became a Nazi. Anti-philosophers are not always in the van of progress. Lurking behind this lineage is the Socratic idea of the philosopher as buffoon, along with the ...”