“... remain, entirely serious. The decision didn’t, I think, coincide with his departure for America. Isherwood and Auden sailed from Southampton on 19 January 1939. In April, Auden was visited by Chester Kallman, and that was that – the rest is lore, gossip, and history of a kind. But Auden’s dealings with Kallman had far more bearing upon his decision to ...”

“... Street. Present as well as the Coldstreams, and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears as co-host with Britten. The stickiness – clearly a source of great amusement to Coldstream and Spender – lay in the tensions between the lifestyles of the people concerned, and the frustration felt by Auden ...”

“... of them notably preoccupied with queer concerns. After the war, the mantle was passed from Vidal, Isherwood, Baldwin and Capote to White, and, more recently, to Cunningham, Hollinghurst and Tóibín. One is hard-pressed to name a significant gay novelist under the age of fifty. One might object – as White does – that the ‘gay greats’ of literary ...”

“... table, McCullers tinkering manically with The Member of the Wedding. One day he breezed into Christopher Isherwood’s Santa Monica home, and Isherwood was entranced. ‘Tennessee is the most relaxed creature imaginable: he works till he’s tired, eats when he feels like it, sleeps when he can’t stay ...”

“... was, for the artist, ‘uninhabitable’. D.H. Lawrence found it so, and Graves and then Auden and Isherwood. But the cases don’t click. For Pound – like James and Eliot – had previously found America uninhabitable. Davie finds America inhabitable. I should hope so too. But why wasn’t it part of his critical obligation, when engaged so much with ‘the ...”

“... unruly age. But he prefers even more the sacrificial transgressions of forbidden love. He sees in Christopher Caudwell’s conversion to Communism a ‘loving surrender to necessity’ that could only have occurred through a ‘psychic revolution in the lover’. Caudwell’s commitment to the proletariat was complete. The politics of less committed writers ...”

“... shattering. The year after the New Verse special a thinly disguised Auden was the star turn in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Lions and Shadows, the first of many mythologising appearances in the reminiscences of his generation: ‘he struck me as being, so to speak, several sizes larger than life,’ ...”

“... unHomeric orchestration which leaves out the reference to the Greeks’ low morale. In Kings, Christopher Logue’s rewriting of Books One and Two (a kind of sequel to his War Music, 1981, a version of Books Sixteen to Nineteen), the line is rendered: ‘And as it is with soldiers, / Sad as we were a laugh or two went up.’ Two changes stand out, which ...”

“... give space to Ross. She was the model for Sally Bowles, the unpolitical fuckwit at the centre of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood had shared a flat with her. But in his novel ‘he created an ineradicable image of Jean that obscured the reality,’ an image that survived for decades into plays ...”

“... at the time, such as ‘Bob, aged 19, goes to Engelbest Tyres’ in September 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 ...”

“... Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar to the work of Genet and Isherwood and Baldwin and Burroughs, but as each new novel or play or poem appeared it was treated as a one-off; if the work was a critical success it was despite its homosexual content, if the work failed it was because of it. But by the Seventies gay men in the ...”