“... 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 ...”

“... almost anything, although the female characters depicted with most sympathy often come across as gay men in disguise. The narrator of ‘The Human Element’ is unfazed when he learns that Lady Betty Welldon-Burns has shacked up with a rough youth in a splendid villa on the Mediterranean coast. Maugham, himself the narrator of The Razor’s Edge, refuses to ...”

“... bold but characteristic step. Auden said in his memorial address that, in technique as well as the search for subject matter, MacNeice ‘shared Cesare Pavese’s belief that “the only joy in life is to begin.”’ And Spender, in a late poem, wrote of MacNeice and Bernard Spencer: Each poem Is still a new beginning. If They had been finished though they ...”

“... he said (quoting Valerius Flaccus), as ‘viridantem floribus hastas’ – ‘making verdant, and gay with the life of flowers, murderous spears and halberts’. ‘The object in my “Opium Confessions”,’ he concluded, is not the naked physiological theme – on the contrary, that is the ugly pole, the murderous spear, the halbert – but those wandering ...”

“... credit as to who ‘invented’ the Paris Review. ‘PARIS REVIEW C’EST MOI,’ Matthiessen told Gay Talese, in a 1963 Esquire article that cemented the legend. Humes credited the name to Matthiessen. ‘I am the Father of the Magazine,’ he once said. ‘George is the Mother.’ And indeed it was Plimpton who did the bulk of the work, maintained ...”

“... female-to-male transsexuals get their stubby new little tubercules, they instantly want to become gay men.The problem with Bev’s Taurus is no CD player, so I had unplugged my office boom box, crammed it with six new giant batteries and brought it along too. In addition to all the jazz stuff – Bird, Dexter, Dizzy, Sonny, Miles, Ornette, Dolphy, the ...”

“... disappointment,’ Steffens wrote when he’d been travelling around the world in the 1920s in search of revolution, ‘to see and hear that sex was the thing.’ Corruption has triumphed and sex has substituted for the political dream. At the end of the First World War he had floated a plan for a general amnesty but ‘the war psychology, which in America ...”

“... kind of considered or memorable shape – dozens of weightless surfaces and battling signifiers in search of a missing hook or core. Listening to middle/late albums like Earthling (1997) or Heathen (2002), parts of which are perfectly pleasant or serviceable modern AOR, I kept thinking: is this the kind of thing Bowie himself would sit and listen to at home ...”

“... and female), the emotional gourmandising, the sheer untrammelled aggressiveness of her search for sensual and imaginative fulfilment – can be at once exhausting and unsettling. She’s scary because she challenges us to a kind of psychosexual wrestling match: who will be the one who gets to suck? For a female biographer – not to mention female ...”

“... as much as they did.) He was particularly interested in the Spanner trial, in which a group of gay men involved in consensual sado-masochistic activity were sent to prison. Karl had no doubt that what the men were doing was none of the state’s business, but he was nonetheless riveted by the detail of the trial. ‘What about love?’ he ...”

“... comfortably). Obama had huge majorities among ethnic minorities, young people, single people, gay people. Old people, married people, people with children voted for Romney. On the upbeat account, this is all fine. Obama won among the demographics that are growing; Romney among the demographics that are shrinking. The progressive majority that Obama ...”

“... It wasn’t long before he cracked. At a checkpoint in Jenin, his commanding officer asked him to search an elderly Palestinian man. Later he would claim that the man was a cousin, though he had never seen him before. No one disputes what happened next: Juliano refused his orders, punched his commanding officer and spent several months in prison. He would ...”

“... these hills, one flowing south, the other west. The stone circle is small and hard to find and the search is made harder because all down the beck cars are parked on the verge and the supposedly unfrequented road up the valley very busy. I had forgotten, but it’s always been like this in the Wharfe Valley from Otley and Ilkley northward, no stretch of it ...”