Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... the clueless, though that is the most immediate and valuable of the tasks this marvellous work of gay and lesbian history accomplishes. ‘In one of her essays on biography, “Lives of the Obscure”,’ Cohen notes in the preface, Virginia Woolf writes that ‘one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of ...”

“... meaning, you might say that someone now was flavoured with the essences belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had forced ...”

“... the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d ...”

“... seem closer to relief than to gloom. As if, once we have been erased from nature’s tablets, a gay science of our exclusion could arise, and our reinstatement as guests with nothing to lose. Thus the frequent exhortations to see without looking, since even the nicest of observers is in the dark. ‘What I need is not to look at all, but a true sauntering ...”