“... do when you’re creating them in fiction. Ronnie, it turned out, was quite right wing, he was gay, he was a historian who’d turned his back on academia and wanted England out of Europe. On Facebook, he expressed his character in his choice of people and institutions to follow. He liked fast food, so, for a while, he had a logo of Wendy’s Burgers on ...”

“... out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or an open sore due to some other sexually transmitted ...”

“... I suppose, to see Gurney as torn between London and Gloucester, music and poetry, peace and war, gay and straight, sense and nonsense. Not so; or perhaps one should more cautiously say, only peripherally so. What it is now possible to see is a rational mind developing. The one thing which reassembling chance-blown papers cannot supply is any sense of ...”

“... often from North London to Sloane Square, walking away from the Royal Court Theatre, rounding Peter Jones on Symons Street and turning up towards Cadogan Square. On entering the house, you rose in a coffin-like lift to the top and walked down to the first half-landing, where the door of her place would be open. Inside, if it was summer, you could browse ...”

“... as much as they did.) He was particularly interested in the Spanner trial, in which a group of gay men involved in consensual sado-masochistic activity were sent to prison. Karl had no doubt that what the men were doing was none of the state’s business, but he was nonetheless riveted by the detail of the trial. ‘What about love?’ he ...”

“... too obviously to her more helpful and positive informants. Wallace Potts, an ex, a pioneering gay pornographer and archivist for the Nureyev Foundation in Bath, on whose initiative the biography was commissioned, is depicted as saintly, which perhaps he was. Another ex, Robert Tracy, who proved difficult to dislodge from Nureyev’s apartment in the ...”

“... to exert influence in American institutions of power and higher learning: the downfall of Claudine Gay, the Harvard president, engineered by the Zionist billionaire Bill Ackman, is just one illustration. As Leifer writes, the uncritical embrace of Zionism has ‘engendered a moral myopia’ with respect to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. The far ...”

“... attack on a synagogue on the gaming platform Twitch; in 2016, the perpetrator of a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida checked Facebook midway through his assault; in 2019, an admirer of the man who murdered 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, expressed a desire to beat that ‘high score’.Seymour’s title intentionally echoes ...”

“... US Air Force dug out and restored the runways on the Pacific island of Tinian from which the Enola Gay and Bockscar took off in 1945. But there are also signs of relations easing. The latest round of the US’s poorly conceived and ill-executed trade war has begun to peter out. When Xi and Trump met in Busan on 30 ...”

“... not be recognised by his parents, so drag seemed the easiest answer. The young man may not even be gay; I actually can’t remember whether there’s anything in the script to suggest this. He could be like Eddie Izzard or indeed Grayson Perry, both of whom prefer to dress as women without it being an indication of their sexual preferences, though in 1980 the ...”

“... the commander of the US forces, accosted his British counterpart, General de la Billière: ‘Hey Peter, what sort of country have you got there when they sack the prime minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very British one. But it was, as Charles Moore describes, the result of a very Tory conspiracy. Thatcher fell following the ...”

“... on. This was just one of the domestic surprises that came in the wake of 11 September. Another was Peter Mandelson’s strangely off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise themselves as Islamic ...”

“... as a sop to those on the right of his party who were agitating against his plan to introduce gay marriage (when it came to a vote, nearly half the parliamentary party anyhow opposed the bill, and it passed only with support from the opposition). The result was that Cameron went into the 2015 election with the referendum as a manifesto promise, and ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... It would be surprising if psychiatric practice from 1967 coincided with modern ideas: plenty of gay men were still going to their analysts to be told that their impulses were intrinsically disordered (it was in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its classifications of mental illness). But Kleinschmidt’s account of ...”