“... recommended the young and unpublished Patricia Highsmith to Yaddo in 1948. In 1949 he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in 1949, he described the arrival of Auden on Ischia as having ‘thrown ...”

“... odd and uncomfortable, even if there are milder precedents for an existential rift of this sort. Angus Wilson’s novels of the 1950s, for instance, offered a panorama of society but also sent covert messages of shared experience to homosexual readers. There’s an extra crackle of suggestive authenticity in the byplay between unrespectable males (‘Oh ...”