“... my career. They wouldn’t publish the book, they said, as a favour to me.’ In London, however, Michael Joseph agreed to publish Giovanni’s Room and, later, in New York, a small publisher, the Dial Press, offered to bring the book out. It first appeared in 1956. Both Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room were declarations of independence for ...”

“... a guise of compassion.Later the same year A Minority by ‘Gordon Westwood’ (the sociologist Michael Schofield) presented the results of interviews with 127 queer men, with statistical breakdowns of where and how often they found partners, and of patterns of friendship and courtship which turned out to be much like hetero ones. The result is pleasingly ...”

“... of prisons. The second secretary of state had privatised the probation service. The third, Michael Gove, had decided to sell off the London prisons, which stood on prime city-centre real estate. Liz Truss, the fourth, had rented out floors in our office building, got rid of more managers and promised to reduce costs across prisons and courts with new ...”

“... reduced me to sudden tears.) I began absorbing ever more specialised fare: Macdonald’s books, Taylor and Tuchman on the political background, battle histories of Gallipoli, Verdun and Passchendaele, books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s ...”

“... were growing up, the only old framed photograph my brothers and I ever saw was of my grandfather Michael, a hero of the Second World War. And that’s always the way he was described to us, a war hero, the man who tried to save his Glasgow compatriots on HMS Forfar when it was struck by two torpedoes in December 1940. Except that story wasn’t true ...”