Search Results

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... to David Furnish last year – even the Daily Express managed to celebrate it as a ‘triumph for gay rights’ – in the Windsor Guildhall, where Charles had married Camilla only eight months before. Having arrived in the same year as the Civil Partnership Register, Matt Houlbrook’s impressive study of queer life in London between 1918 and 1957 does much ...”

“... Colin MacInnes) and you’re plunged into a lost river with discrete but commingled tributaries: gay, criminal, East End Jewish, upper-class drop-out, lower-class dandy; the ‘morries’ of Cook’s dodgy Chelsea set, and Baron’s Harryboy Boas, a proto-Mod. ‘One thing about me, I always dress smartly,’ Boas declares. ‘A good suit, midnight blue ...”

“... impossibility – of rivers flowing backwards and cattle grazing at sea, fish feeding on dry land, gay men getting married: Shades of our ancestors! Is it a moral reformer we need, or an augur Of evil omens? Would you be more horrified, or think it A more ghastly portent, if women calved, or cows Gave birth to lambs? as Juvenal put it (with thanks to ...”

“... murder. For Mangold, the important thing about Thorpe’s story was not that an unjust law laid a gay politician open to blackmail and even to the temptation to dispose of the blackmailer, but what he saw as an establishment cover-up, which kept Thorpe out of trouble for years. Published, at Thorpe’s request, after his death, Michael Bloch’s eminently ...”

“... of taste seem an absurd condescension. Even Pop Art was still fine art going popular, but Peter Blake’s and David Hockney’s mature commercial appearances rated star billing and held their own in record stores and poster shops. Minton did not have Piper’s or Ravilious’s Betjemanesque delight in the look of England, but his Death of ...”

“... vulgar postcard Brighton (Carry on at Your Convenience), louche Brighton (The First Gentleman, The Gay Divorcee), the Brighton of the disaffected young (Quadrophenia) and the Brighton that mixes violence and fairground glitter (Brighton Rock, Oh! What a Lovely War) – are extracted as simple essences from the mix that is the town ...”

“... The Sloane Ranger style, Peter York has told us, reflects ‘a state of mind that’s eternal’. This may be putting it a bit strongly: but the Sloane ancestry goes back at least to the days when knighthood was in flower and one really needed a pony. Like British trade unions, Sloanes have deep roots as a defensively-organised collective, and ‘What Really Matters’ to them may well matter differently, or not matter at all, to everyone else ...”

“... this, because it is a view from the outside, is offered up with an apology. When he interviewed ‘gay people and haemophiliacs and others who have been most affected by Aids in this country, I usually felt I was selling them short.’ You cannot easily put art about Aids in the art-only box: it is part of a dialogue, between those who have the disease and ...”

“... essay his fans see a different Lewis Thomas – angry where he was once urbane, grim rather than gay, for no aspect of the bomb is at all funny and upon this subject Thomas is unrelievedly grave. His night thoughts are akin to those that most of us have when awake at dawn or sleepless in the small hours of the morning, or whenever the faculty of ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... seemingly indifferent to the internal regulation of its direction. It is this focus which informs Peter Goodrich’s Languages of Law. The book appears to be a collection of disparate essays, oddly connected and repetitive, but which nevertheless circle back obsessively to the question of how the law sustains its own authority. Goodrich continually queries ...”

“... Nowadays it’s possible to make a career exclusively within gay journalism. Roger Baker, however, was a journalist of wide-ranging interests whose careful think-pieces were a strong feature of Gay News in the mid-Seventies, but who was just as comfortable writing for the Times ...”

“... Winshaw Prize’ stars Josephine Winshaw-Eaves, the daughter of Hilary Winshaw and Sir Peter Eaves, a newspaper editor. Like her mother, Josephine is a tabloid columnist in the Katie Hopkins mould. She attends an awards ceremony for a prize her family has sponsored and put its name to – a prize, ridiculously, for the best prize (it goes to the ...”

“... older to maintain even the semblance of sexual restraint, he ended his days in confinement, where Peter Gay reminds us he once tried to molest his visiting daughter. Gordon’s Austin ought to have anticipated the problems of his marriage. Sue Dickinson had such a terror of childbearing (her sister having died of puerperal fever) that before their ...”