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“... deny his character anything. Rabbit flees from the stony immovability of Janice and takes up with Ruth Leonard, a former prostitute, and I believe that Updike’s reputation as a sex writer rests on a paragraph that comes during their first sexual encounter: When she has peeled off the stockings and tucked them, tidily rolled, into the crevice by the ...”

“... fright-bag. Heartbreakingly attractive in her youth (see the exquisite nude portraits made by her gay photographer friend Rolf Tietgens in the early 1940s), she looked like a sullen gargoyle by the time she died: rubbery, bloodshot, wrinkled to the point of cave-in, a calamitous experiment in DIY self-pickling. Compared with Highsmith in her seventies, her ...”

“... Ulster from Sodomy campaign of the late 1970s still has an influence in a party that opposes both gay marriage and abortion. It also has several prominent members who are ‘young earth creationists’, insistent that the truth of the world’s creation in 4004 bc should be made clear to visitors at the Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland’s most popular ...”

“... Invisible Man but believed in the promise of a racially inclusive American democracy. Baldwin, the gay stepson of a preacher, dreamed that romantic love between a white man and a black man might give birth to ‘another country’. Himes was black American literature’s one authentic nihilist. In his novels, solutions to what was then called the ‘Negro ...”

“... to cure. There were, of course, whites who went much further than Gordimer did. Compared with Ruth First and Bettie du Toit, she always felt that she had not been brave enough. ‘She was so fearless,’ Gordimer wrote of Ruth First, ‘that she made one feel ashamed.’ ‘In comparison,’ she wrote in her preface to ...”

“... Otis Skinner – American stage actress and author of the sublime Our Hearts Were Young and Gay – wrote a boffo if now somewhat dated biography for English readers in 1967 entitled Madame Sarah. (In the requisite Mucha-decorated dustjacket, it became a supermarket bestseller in the US in that long-ago Summer of Love.) And the prolific biographer and ...”

“... in the field. With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his colleague Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The ...”

“... naval rating’ who keeps Jo company over Christmas and leaves her pregnant. And Geof, the gay art student who becomes Jo’s flatmate and nursemaid – until Helen barges back in and sends him packing. The play ends as it begins, with Helen and Jo in a bedsit – entangled, stuck, sparring, unforgettable.This is a long way from the marriage ...”

“... became interested in writing about McCorvey twelve years ago, while learning about the attempts of gay rights activists to bring the issue of marriage equality before the Supreme Court. Since the justices won’t consider hypothetical cases, the activists needed to find real people to file suit, ‘stakeholders’ willing to swear that the outcome would ...”

“... a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond hair. Thom Gunn ...”

“... has begun to gather speed. He is expelled from his nursery, a staggering inheritance from that gay leathern uncle is won and lost in what seems only a day, his father is assassinated while attempting to shield the real target. But the elision of these years has less to do with memory and more to do with the fact that to be young and unformed is ...”

“... was that Susan was autistic.) Appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show shortly after Rain Man opened, Ruth Sullivan, the doyenne of American parent advocates, said that the movie had ‘advanced the field of autism by 25 years’. The new public fascination with autism, coupled with the rise in diagnoses, gave activist groups a long-awaited chance to secure ...”

“... Molly like the only way to escape from the surviving members of her decrepit family. Her mother, Ruth, was needy, smothering and idiotically pious, while her elder sister, Joan, a borderline psychopath, had contrived to make her childhood a misery and showed no sign of letting up any time soon. Both did all they could to humiliate Molly. ‘She is ...”

“... blow up the Houses of Parliament.) Sentenced to life imprisonment, he would eventually become what Ruth Dudley Edwards described as ‘the spider at the centre of the conspiratorial web’ that would lead to the 1916 Rebellion in Dublin more than thirty years later. He was, in her words, ‘able, vengeful, focused, selfless and implacable’.Clarke’s time in ...”

“... would prohibit the right to abort a foetus are the same ones that want to pathologise trans and gay people. Trans-exclusionary feminists have a choice to make: whether to continue providing sustenance to highly organised and murderous right-wing forces, or come into coalition, however uncomfortable, with those of us looking to stop them.Writing in Women: A ...”