“... 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 ...”

“... Goblet of Fire; Viktor Frankl’s memoir of his confinement in Nazi concentration camps, Man’s Search for Meaning, served as her ‘How to Survive Prison’ manual. She sang, at the top of her lungs, every song she knew by heart: the Beatles, Christmas carols, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.Once she was moved to ‘general population’, Knox met ...”

“... facts of your life would you call to yourself to raise your identity from the dead? Would you search your pockets for old receipts, a driver’s licence, a notebook? ‘Did I live with Son? And his mother, perhaps? Did I have a wife? I closed my eyes and tried to think of Wife. No face appeared, not even when I tried to picture Son, to conjure up an image ...”

“... present in the flesh, and after a six-week acquaintance duly ousted the tea planter. Turpin was gay, which made for a tepid courtship on both sides. ‘Molly had been converted to Catholicism by Bo,’ Bingham notes, ‘and passed it on to Richard, who probably thought that religion would help, too.’ After civil and religious ceremonies, and a truly ...”