“... in Death in Venice – and not just in Mann’s novella but also in Visconti’s spectacular gay film – was far closer to the writer’s secret life than most people had imagined. T.J. Reed says in the Cambridge Companion that ‘any observant reader of the works’ would have guessed what the diaries revealed, but this is being a trifle optimistic ...”

“... in love poems. The sacred shows up in the profane, and vice versa: Like pictures, or like bookes gay coverings, made For lay men, are all women thus arayd, Themselves are mistique books, which only wee Whom their imputed grace will dignify Must see revealed. ‘Elegy VIII’As Christ justifies unworthy believers through his imputed grace, so a woman ...”

“... and I gave a joint reading – no, a sequential reading – at the YMHA.’ This enacting of a search for further precision and further care with terms was, in one way, a trick, a way of making the reader believe and trust a voice, or a way of quietly asking the reader to follow the poem’s casual and then deliberate efforts to be faithful to what it ...”

“... overt act – Buying greens on a Sunday morning. The rich man is invisible In the crowd of his gay society; But the poor man’s delight Is a sore in the sight And a stench in the nose of piety. The rich man goes out yachting Where sanctity can’t pursue him; The poor goes afloat In a fourpenny boat Where the bishop groans to view him. But the truth is ...”

“... for meanings of a certain sort’, he says, that the being of a poem consists; and that search is the best response to the vast alterations in consciousness that beset us, our only way of recovering ‘a less relaxed, a less adventitious order for the mind’. It is the point of Science and Poetry, reinforced by an understanding of Coleridge as the ...”

“... practising. Zombie Catholics prefer authoritarian values to egalitarian ones, and they are in search of a universalising, transcendent faith to replace the one they have abandoned. They are the new reactionary force shaping the cultural politics of France in the 21st century. But how is this force on the periphery – its territory more or less the same ...”

“... feminists and liberal Catholics rallied to her as the champion of the wrongly accused, so gay rights activists now claim her for themselves. In Lille in 2010, her statue was draped in pink: ‘le relooking queer de Jeanne d’Arc’, ran the headline on citegay.com, showing that, during her afterlife at least, English has not been kept out of ...”

“... Aracoeli (1982), is an exceedingly dark and bitter monologue written in the voice of a lonely gay man, recalling his lifelong obsession with his long-dead mother and her brother, Manuel, who died in Spain fighting for the Republicans: it might have been the image left on the paper by Pasolini’s poem ‘Supplica a mi madre’, superimposed with the ...”

“... been the residence of a notorious Jewish anti-Semite: Maurice Ettinghausen, better known as the gay Jewish writer and thief Maurice Sachs, an associate of Cocteau, Max Jacob and Gide who was rumoured to have been an informer for the Gestapo. Sachs was killed at the end of the war, probably executed by the SS. In his father’s library, Modiano discovered ...”

“... America – to recognise at the same time that in terms of civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights, things have, at least until now, got manifestly better.By choosing only a single axis of oppression – by passing over what he describes as ‘unlovely feelings’ expressed for ‘aesthetic’ purposes – Jameson evades readings that would ...”

“... flower power, music, libertarian sexual politics – softly pornographic while staunchly pro-gay, with a smattering of second-wave feminism – and a contempt for the establishment that occasionally strays into serious politics. IT had been quicker to respond to ‘les événements’ in Paris than OZ, the other widely read underground paper, largely ...”

“... Abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights, labour and antiwar activists, advocates of women’s and gay liberation, jazz musicians, Abstract Expressionist painters, Beat poets: all were deeply American in their way. So were many of the communists who in the 1930s declared that communism was ‘20th-century Americanism’. As Eric Foner has ...”

“... as had been demonstrated by Lloyd George, with his insistence on pressing on with the war in search of a final ‘knock-out blow’, and then allowing ‘war fever’ to be embedded in the Treaty of Versailles. Yet Goldring was more vexed by the influence of ‘quick-witted’ and ‘naturally tyrannical’ Scots. In his autobiography, Odd Man ...”

“... Party’s mixture of technocratic slogans and gestures to identity-based interest groups (gay marriage, abortion rights, immigration reform), topped off by the Democrats’ own version of imperial grandiosity. The intellectual bankruptcy of the Democratic Party is nowhere more evident than in the looming presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham ...”

“... so many people been searching for England,’ H.V. Morton wrote in his blowsy Baedeker of 1927, In Search of England. They were looking for something which many of them had never seen. But if the countryside was unrecognisable, however untouched by war, it was also because the eyes that saw it had been changed utterly. Shortly before his death Rupert Brooke ...”