“... were, to a lad, left out. In the summer the British Art Show arrived in London. In the meantime, Peter Fuller had died in a car crash. Fuller never lived to type out the words ‘Damien Hirst’. He died before the Turner Prize began to favour younger artists, before Saatchi started collecting the new art of the Nineties. But his is still a spectral presence ...”

“... of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist awakening’ in the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Admiralty’s dogma that ‘the best guarantee for the peace of the world is a supreme British fleet’ became the leading edge of Imperial ...”

“... Times; another printed alongside Allan Gurganus’s obituary in the Advocate, a glossy American gay and lesbian mag usually devoted to pulchritudinous gym bunnies, gay sitcom stars and treatments for flesh-eating strep. It seemed the least I could do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... those paintings where the painter, like his brother, conjured up an Ireland both ‘terrible and gay’. For painter, poet and ex-revolutionary, such visions supplied a kind of compensation. English has had unique access to O’Malley’s papers in private hands as well as to the large archive in University College, Dublin, and has written a fascinating ...”

“... is very much the approach of Billy Lee Brammer’s ‘classic American political novel’, The Gay Place, first published in 1961 and now republished in Britain.4 Lord Harlech epitomises the method in his foreword: ‘We see and we feel how that world makes and breaks men and women both in their public life and in their private life.’ Another way of ...”

“... Ayrton. In the dark background are the diabolic Bernard Van Dieren and Philip Heseltine (‘Peter Warlock’), two men, composer-writers like himself, to whom Lambert maintained a fierce loyalty, before and after their deaths. Lambert’s cardinal importance in the establishment of the Vic-Wells, later the Royal Ballet, is valuably stressed by ...”

“... himself by dressing up in drag, replete with false eyelashes and perfume, in order to hang around gay bars and make fun of gays who tried to pick him up. He was deeply enthused by every form of sexual excess and deviation, sado-masochism, Black Masses and whatever other sorts of mystic nonsense were on offer. Most of his time was spent boozing and ...”

“... who’s seen giving ‘his best imitation of a guileless smile’ – he makes the character gay, perhaps to take the edge of eccentric wilfulness off his advanced sense of camp. Willis (as everyone calls him) in Preston Falls, the most lifelike of Gates’s nightmare husbands, is more the Merle Haggard type. A man with literary ambitions of some kind in ...”

“... poet was a persona, and the sonnets to the young man no more implied that Shakespeare was gay than Macbeth implied that he was a murderer. Of course, in an age in which it is being argued that Internet pornography featuring virtual sex with computer-generated minors should be a prosecutable offence, claiming that Shakespeare was a pederast only in his ...”

“... for criticising the ‘child protection referendum’ held by Orbán in 2022 to confirm his anti-gay 2021 legislation. Freedom House also pointed out that the media largely comprises pro-government outlets operating under the umbrella of the Central European Press and Media Foundation, and that the 2022 election was ‘not free, let alone fair’. In May ...”

“... could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again’. ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused ...”

“... him, Zuckerberg insists that online connection is a perfect substitute for human contact.Here’s Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, who put $10 million into the lawsuit that in 2016 bankrupted Gawker, which had outed him as gay. This might make you think he cared about privacy, but he also founded Palantir, which surveils ...”

“... Epstein flashed on but Taylor didn’t? Perhaps his own outsider status in postwar Britain – gay, Jewish, not situated quite precisely enough in the nation’s ossified class structure – afforded him a glimpse of a new kind of culture in which edgy outsiders would become glamorous commodities. Epstein’s quiet overhaul of the Beatles after he became ...”

“... of the man friendship with whom helped to ruin Robert Oppenheimer’s career. Chevalier was not gay but equally reprehensibly a Communist. 11 May, Long Crichel. Yesterday as I was driving down to Dorset (with no radio) the prime minister had gone up to Trimdon and his constituency of Sedgefield in order to bring his term of office to a ...”