“... back tae snowk at his bockin ... Grumphie douks i the burn, an syne rows again i the glaur. (II Peter 2.22: ‘The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire’). Except perhaps for a few scholars, no one, however Scots, is going to know all the words in this translation; most Scots will not know a great ...”

“... compatriots. In Rome, Catholic priests formed part of the British colony, the genial Scot Peter Grant being ‘an agreeable companion to everybody’ and the Jesuit John Thorpe acting as an agent for the purchase of works of art. Father Thorpe commissioned paintings and furnishings for the chapel of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, a unique surviving ...”

“... would have been a sex-ridden hag.’ Men who associate with such floozies are quite likely to be gay – a contemptible form of ‘nastiness’, in Marlowe’s view, though a drunken novelist later tells him it’s unwise to say so in print: ‘The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum.’ Either way, it’s invariably men who provoke his strongest ...”

“... keep himself mysterious. (‘The first time I heard Neil Tennant describe the Pet Shop Boys as a gay band … I wished he hadn’t,’ Almond is quoted as saying in Jones’s book.) But time alters your sense of what risk really is. Soft Cell were pouting at the lads and their fads and their bigoted old dads. It turns out that the inheritors of punk were not ...”

“... into bringing in the naughty gear, which nowadays would barely draw a glance at Sydney’s annual Gay and Lesbian Ball. Goossens was fined £100; he resigned his conductorship of the new Sydney Symphony Orchestra and died broken-hearted and forgotten back in England. The Opera House had already lost its first, most eloquent and influential champion. The ...”

“... about the move to Wapping, with the remark that ‘If I bend over any further I’ll be in Gay News.’ One of Mackenzie’s ploys is his execution of a ‘reverse ferret’, a last-minute substitution of a big story by an even bigger one. When Myra Hindley obtained an injunction preventing the newspaper from running a story about her, Mackenzie ...”

“... has less to say. It is well illustrated by Three Hours after Marriage, a farce written by John Gay, with the assistance of John Arbuthnot and the young Alexander Pope, which was performed at Drury Lane in 1717. The leading character, Dr Fossile, has just married a much younger woman (‘the best of my curiosities’) and is unaware that two would-be ...”

“... I Ching seems unlike the man I knew. Lambert reveals that at Oxford he himself had a fling with Peter Brook whom I had thought a model of heterosexuality but who seduced Lambert via a silk dressing-gown and Chopin nocturnes on the gramophone. It’s something to be remembered nowadays when the sage of dthe modern theatre is taking himself too seriously ...”

“... of consciousness, planetary extinction – have become urgent global concerns, a critic like Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, presumably speaking for a politburo, can still assure his readers that Burroughs ‘wages literary war not on perceptible real-world targets but against suggestions that anyone is responsible for anything’ and that a writer ...”

“... Fund to a range of Hungarian NGOs, including the Roma Press Agency, the Rainbow Association (for gay rights), the Foundation for Democratic Youth and the Hungarian branch of Transparency International, on the grounds that these are all ‘anti-government organisations’. When an independent online paper interviewed experts on matters of public ...”

“... leaving her in imminent danger of being convicted of poisoning her worthless ex-lover. Lord Peter Wimsey, whimsically love-struck and coming to the rescue, confronts the real villain: Yes, well, about this arsenic. As you know, it’s not good for people in a general way, but there are some people – those tiresome peasants in Styria one hears so much ...”

“... shameful imaginings’). This time there’s a plot: the young (white) lesbian wife of a grand, gay (white) Southern poet runs off with her infant daughter and conceals herself from his inquiries by passing as a black lone parent. The racial caste system in rural Virginia being what it is, the blonde daughter, Karen, grows up not only thinking of herself as ...”

“... murder of a head of state (even of a dead former head of state) on a book cover was too shocking. Gay novels are off limits.Then there is the case of Salman Rushdie. The scholar Liu Kaifang translated Midnight’s Children in 2002, but his publisher promptly got cold feet and the book was pulled. In 2015, another house bought the rights and published the ...”

“... The translators there are Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson.The afterlife of Scott Moncrieff’s 1922-30 version is interesting too. First, not all of it is his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas ...”

“... the Koch brothers, who seem determined to repeal the New Deal; the anti-immigrant extremists Peter Brimelow and Stephen Miller; climate change deniers; adherents of gun culture; and Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr, who has blamed increased toleration of gay men and lesbians for the supposed moral ...”