“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The World-Telegram ran an eight-part autobiography of the new star. (‘My full name is Joseph Peter Di Maggio Jr,’ it began, and thus, Cramer says, ‘Joe attained his first major league record: youngest player ever to get his own name wrong in his autobiography.’ He was Joseph Paul, son of Giuseppe. The space in ‘Di Maggio’ makes another ...”

“... encouragingly, this book also contains a great deal of love and subversion. In the 12th century, Peter Abelard, having been separated from his wife and son, forcibly castrated and confined to a monastery, nevertheless remained committed to the view that ‘no natural pleasures of the flesh should be counted as sin.’ It should not be considered a fault, he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that Superman was potentially fascist, that Batman and Robin could be construed as positive gay role models, and that Wonder Woman’s early adventures had a bondage subtext. (Never mind that such views, without the disapproval of gay role models, have since become received wisdom among ...”

“... to make other men fall in love with him,’ she writes. ‘The list of sexually ambiguous and gay men who did find Stevenson almost mesmerisingly attractive is long, including Gosse, Andrew Lang and, later, Henry James.’ In literary terms, which were the only terms properly familiar to Stevenson, ambiguity was at the heart of everything, and The Strange ...”

“... 1980s, when I was researching the commissioning and installation of the statue of Shakespeare by Peter Scheemakers in Westminster Abbey in 1741 as part of my doctorate, I discovered that one of the leading proponents and fundraisers for the project had been Susanna Ashley-Cooper, née Noel, Countess of Shaftesbury. It became clear that she was also the ...”

“... of Roger Casement’s Life and Times, with a Collection of His Diaries and Public Writings, by Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias, published by Grove Press in New York and the Olympia Press in Paris, was an extraordinary book. It included potted histories of Ireland, the Congo and the Putumayo in the Amazon basin, an account of Casement’s life ...”

“... was one of the distinctive illnesses associated with the mysterious new condition then known as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 1983 said it was becoming clear that ‘haemophiliacs are at risk for Aids,’ and argued that using Factor VIII ‘may exact a high cost’. Ten haemophiliacs in the US ...”

“... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...”

“... high-school teacher George Caldwell, half-myth and half-man like any father. His son, Peter, aged 15, is both convinced of Caldwell’s immortality and fears his death. Because Peter wishes to be an artist, and is experiencing the same awakening Updike experienced, the book is seen through surreal endless ...”