“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the CMC and built up a modern fleet of fast cruisers, linked to a wireless network, for search-and-seize operations along the China coast. It was this kind of work to which my father was assigned, first as Deputy and then as Commissioner ad interim in Hong Kong, controlling the movement of small gunboats in the waters round the island. He was ...”

“... precocious Jacqueline or merely fantasised about doing so: the crime scene, but not his anxious search for an alibi, has been erased from the narrative (‘the abnormal, excessive, suspicious, inexplicable time amounted to forty minutes – if not fifty’). Not only are we denied a resolution, but our thwarted attempt to find one, to assign guilt and fill ...”

“... or go outside. Outside, I think.MILLER: Watch out. There’s police in these parts that go in search of pee-takers and revolutionaries.Hogg’s grave was lavishly carved and had a harp at the centre of all the words and recommendations.MILLER: That was his seal, that harp. It’s remarkably ostentatious, isn’t it?HEANEY: Aye. And there’s a Grieve over ...”

“... to remain silent comes from Palestinians too. One feminist blogger who recounted the naked strip search of a woman detainee from Hebron was asked by the woman’s family to delete the account. The detainee had begun to receive threats that, according to her sister, did not come from Israeli authorities. The fear that reporting, sharing or officially ...”