“... too is a struggle to break free of ‘typecasting’ – a refusal to accept the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of ...”

“... those celebrity ‘shag-tree’ diagrams found on the internet, the ones that purport to show that Tom Cruise and Pope Benedict, say, have both slept with X or Y. But Murphy and Garland weren’t exactly pillow-queens either. Just about the only person mostly missing from the intimate cavalcade of biddable and beddable is Radclyffe Hall, author of the ...”