“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no, I can quite see how it might fail a seriousness test. (One can almost hear the shade of Peter Cook, intoning regretfully how he ‘never had the reading for the spying’.) Lord Kim, on the other hand, might just about have served, given the fact that H. St John Philby got himself called everything from sahib to tuan all across the British ...”

“... Trump style is “developing-country despot”, rather than European or “evolved American”,’ Peter York wrote in the Times. ‘It doesn’t even try to get things “right” – “real” antiques, architecturally correct detailing or any of that – because, as with DC despots, neither the client nor the people he wants to impress care about ...”

“... writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s mainstay,’ Taylor writes, but the ‘degree of attachment surprised us both. Were we lovers? Obviously not. Were we in ...”

“... skull, but Republicans made light of the assault, with some insinuating that DePape was a gay escort. Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, said, with mock solemnity, ‘There’s no room for violence anywhere,’ then added: ‘But we’re going to send her back to be with him in California.’ Donald Trump Jr posted a photograph of a hammer and ...”

“... party, is a dwarf, a worldly, jaded, funny, highly intelligent cynic and, as incarnated by Peter Dinklage, the indisputable star turn of the HBO series. The king and his entourage take up residence at Winterfell, ancestral home of the Starks. We see much of their antics from the perspective of Bran Stark, second-youngest son of Eddard, a ...”

“... heroes. Many parents will be angry with what I have just said. ‘It is not like that at all. Peter is the most lovable little boy. We understand his need to have everything just so and we know he has trouble playing with other children. It’s a shame we cannot take him out much, because he gets disturbed and people don’t understand. But his ...”

“... the ‘rainbow-bird’ of one of her final poems, ‘Sonnet’, ‘flying wherever/it feels like, gay!’ ‘Writing poetry,’ she declares sternly in a lecture drafted in the 1960s but never delivered, ‘is an unnatural act.’ During her junior year at Vassar, in 1933-34, Bishop cofounded a short-lived magazine in which she published a short story called ...”

“... At the end of 1928 he moved to London, where he grew close to a number of older, cultivated gay men who often paid for him, supplementing the allowance he received from his mother. Eric Allden, who gets only passing mentions in the other biographies, emerges in Stevens and Swan’s book as an important early friend with an important private income. He ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”

“... John Huston’s Beat the Devil. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh’s soft spot, a secret passion for Rita Hayworth, and saves their lives by promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the ...”

“... One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common. These two works ...”

“... Notting Hill, the other claiming to have exuberant sex with his wife. The best line comes when the gay one asks, re some straight sexual marathon: ‘How long did it go on?’ ‘Well if you include the foreplay and the wind-down afterwards I don’t suppose we had much change from three hours.’ ‘Three hours? Good God! You could be in Leeds in that ...”

“... as a short book, it included Thompson’s suggestion, barely veiled, that Hitler was probably gay. When she returned to Berlin in 1934, she knew better than to expect a warm welcome from the new chancellor. But no American reporter had been expelled from the Reich until Thompson received a hand-delivered letter from the Gestapo that accused her of ...”