Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... in the WAAFs or as seamen on the Western Approaches makes one want to raise a cheer, not for gay liberation particularly, but for toleration and common sense, and also for courage.In tonight’s programme there’s an unlikely homosexual, a Doncaster miner, Fred Dyson; photographs show him as a merry-faced boy built like the proverbial brick ...

The Ground Hostess

Francis Wyndham, 1 April 1983

... As I had never made any kind of pass at either of them, Harriet had convinced herself that I was gay, while Jeremy had vaguely assumed that I must be straight. When they began to inquire a little further about the course of my romance, she automatically used the masculine pronoun and he the feminine. Somehow unable to maintain a total silence on the ...

I Could Sleep with All of Them

Colm Tóibín: The Mann Family, 6 November 2008

In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story 
by Andrea Weiss.
Chicago, 302 pp., £14.50, May 2008, 978 0 226 88672 5
Show More
Show More
... early.”’ Some things ran in the family. Homosexuality, for instance. Thomas himself was gay most of the time, as his diaries make clear. So were three of his children: Erika (also just most of the time; she made an exception for Bruno Walter, among others), Klaus and Golo. Suicide was a family theme too. Both of Thomas Mann’s sisters committed ...

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan: Can I speak freely?, 29 June 2023

... Charles Vaughan, chief of staff of Thiel Capital, owned by the billionaire former Trump supporter Peter Thiel, and Jordan Peterson, who was invited by Orr and other academics to be a visiting fellow at the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity in 2019. After a photo emerged of Peterson with a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I’m a proud ...

One Exceptional Figure Stood Out

Perry Anderson: Dmitri Furman, 30 July 2015

... polls showed most Americans already accepted the idea of a black president, if not yet imagining gay marriage – could not be halted. The immanent development of faith was destroying the foundations on which it rested. If the bourgeois order was to persist in the United States, new forms and means of integrating the individual and society would have to be ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
Show More
The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
Show More
Show More
... or duller than we have been led to suppose, or had wasted his time in Washington. If you look up Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, though, you will find a record of some affable chinwags with Berlin, tending to confirm Auden and MacNeice’s award, in Letters from Iceland, of a ‘dish of milk’ to the feline Isaiah. And some other living cloak-and-gown experts ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... gym I belong to – became existential torture devices. No more Frasier reruns or baseball: just Peter Jennings and dirty bombs.The boys with tattoos flexed nervously. Even the female-to-male transsexuals looked shaken. (It’s a gay gym.) I went through my own quiet days feeling gusty, shocked and forlorn. Blakey was ...
... against Britain, and Irish independence.More recently, historians have offered other narratives. Peter Hart, for example, has called the Rebellion ‘a unique example of insurrectionary abstract art’:The surprise, the proclamation, the tricolour, the seized buildings and barricades were all there, but the targets seem almost purely symbolic or even ...

The Laying on of Hands

Alan Bennett, 7 June 2001

... no need sometimes for the deity to draw attention to himself so obviously. It had something of St Peter and the cock crowing thrice about it, not an incident Father Jolliffe was particularly fond of as it showed Jesus up as a bit of an ‘I told you so’, which on the quiet the priest felt he sometimes was anyway. Today, though, the intervention of the clock ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... the website that sets up extramarital affairs, others that he’d been seen on Grindr, the gay hook-up app. During a six-hour layover in Hong Kong, he killed his email accounts and tried to wipe his social media profile, which he knew would be heavy with information he wasn’t keen to publicise: ‘Mainly rants,’ he said later. When he got to Manila ...