“... credibly, and often fall prey to wishful thinking; truly persuasive large-scale accounts are rare (Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony, posthumously published in 2020, is a bold but sketchy attempt). Queer studies, in particular, can be pulled between the desire to accord marginal sexualities proper recognition and attention, and the political intuition ...”

“... which has led to a tide of unchecked and uncheckable tabloid stories and tales of what the butler says he saw.Princess Margaret belonged to the generation that didn’t talk to the press, but the press talked about her, and after her scandalous romance with the divorced Captain Peter Townsend they talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as ...”

“... won the 1973 Booker Prize. The award dinners of those days were not ready for primetime: Rab Butler, drunk, tried to warm up the audience with some anti-semitic jokes (‘A Scotsman, an Irishman and a Jewboy – that sort of thing,’ according to Martyn Goff; Terence Kilmartin walked out), and Farrell then followed the 1972 winner, John Berger, in ...”

“... like the mind/body problem. In fact, the climax provides a sort of answer to that conundrum. Harry Butler, adulterous philosophy professor, is about to fall victim to a frame-up by militant lesbians at his university, and is saved professionally by the vigorous intervention of his hitherto merely mystical wife. But the price of his assured future proves to be ...”

“... other places – suggest affirmative answers. Two notable studies have appeared recently: Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One ...”

“... that invariably comes with our confident discovery in the past of patterns and developments. Christopher Duffy even provides a map of the likely troop movements to the north of London, making graphically real the imaginary confrontation with which I began. He counts out all the groups of soldiers that would have been involved and tries to estimate the ...”

“... invalid chair. Auden briefly and reluctantly tutored their son, and his nocturnal hospitality to Christopher Isherwood was announced with distaste by the family butler. Her long liaison with the darkly romantic Alexander Kerensky, which began in cloak-and-dagger circumstances in New York, was only one of many points at ...”

“... of doubt that was lost in his transcription. Now, in a new critical edition by Ian Forrest and Christopher Whittick, the visitation book is available in full translation for the first time.* As they write: ‘It is not an objective record of what was happening in medieval parishes, being in fact much more fascinating than that.’ In 1397 the visitors ...”

“... over the temporary triumph of the ‘Tripartite’ system which ensured that, under the 1944 ‘Butler Act’ dispensation of secondary education for all, the majority of schoolchildren were divided into quasi-‘scholarship’ grammar-school sheep and rejected ‘sec. mod.’ goats – comprehensive education in most places came many years later. The ...”

“... family, the Wilkinses, over a number of weeks – and discovered that their youngest child, Christopher, was the deliberate result of an extra-marital affair; that Karen and Gary married at 16 because Karen was pregnant; that another daughter, Heather, was going to marry a black boy; that yet another daughter, Marion, had sexual relations with her ...”

“... no stigma attaches to being a secret fantasy-snob and no one minds being bullied in a book. But Christopher Sykes, who saw much of Waugh in the Army, and who remained a warm friend, had to remark in his biography that ‘to the naturally weak he was as merciless as he had been in his bullying schooldays ... it always utterly disgusted me.’ Nonetheless ...”

“... Green told his interviewer that ‘the writer must be disengaged’, and enjoyed pointing out that Christopher Isherwood, who called Living ‘the best proletarian novel ever written’, had never worked in a factory himself. Pontifex’s own employees, having rumbled the fact that Yorke and Green were the same, weren’t so impressed. ‘I read your ...”

“... were forbidden the use of the carpeted main staircase; Williams’s boss, Humphrey Milford, had a butler who served drinks on a silver salver. His lyrics found an enthusiastic supporter in Alice Meynell, the Catholic versifier, critic and protector of poets – she and her husband, Wilfred Meynell, also nurtured the talent of the wayward Francis ...”

“... he called at his house, he said: ‘Guys, what about launching a paper?’ We decided we would and Christopher Logue was deputed to go to what’s now the British Library to look into possible names. I’d said: ‘I’m totally opposed to traditional left names – “Workers’ this”, or “Socialist that”. The people who are coming into politics are not ...”

“... 1923. It’s like Isherwood’s retrospective marvelling, as he sets off to America at the end of Christopher and His Kind, at the unknown future and the unknown life partner who await him: ‘He will be near you for many years without your meeting. But it would be no good if you did meet him now. At present, he is only four years old.’ Forster seems never ...”