“... two machismos’. The view is easy to deny (just as it is easy to deny that there has been a search for political advantage): but it is a view which it would be a mistake to dismiss. It is natural, and important, for a country which has lost so much in the way of face in the last few years to attempt to save it. That is why it was a mistake to start with ...”

“... and production values of English history as much as his new friend, Churchill. His pictures were Gay Hussar and high Tory. In time, he opened offices in America ample enough to hide the coming and going of the British Secret Service. At a crucial moment, 1941, he made That Hamilton Woman, the Nelson-Emma story, with Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and a rousing ...”

“... defacements of the original must be detected and removed if it is to be properly appreciated. The search for the authentic in literature relies on the presence of the inauthentic; without it the recovery of the original cannot begin. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, the most daring of Coleridge’s poems, embeds the corrupting presence in the ...”

“... each other for certain things but not for others, promotes the misleading idea that we are all in search of completion. Bewitched by the notion of being complete, we become obsessed by notions of sameness and difference, by thoughts of what to include and what to reject in order to keep ourselves whole. But maintaining this icon of ourselves confronts us with ...”

“... of the century new sorts of balls – working-class balls, widows’ balls, balls for the deaf, gay and lesbian balls – took place in the dance halls opening up across Berlin. (Clärchens Ballhaus, which features in Alfred Döblin’s Alexanderplatz, closed earlier this year, ostensibly for renovation.) Dance partners were for the evening, not for ...”

“... ash on the south side of the common. The area round here is a notorious cruising ground for men in search of casual homosexual encounters, and often when I walk through it in the mornings I will spot a used condom, as if it were some strange kind of latex airborne slug that, having leaped for the skies, has ended up dangling from the brambles. I don’t wish ...”

“... 1987-89. At this point the old title, Remembrance of Things Past, was dropped, and the plainer In Search of Lost Time taken on.There is more. In 2013, the first volume of William C. Carter’s ‘revised, annotated’ version of Scott Moncrieff’s work appeared from Yale. Four other volumes of the set are now also available, with one still to come. Carter ...”

“... and sweaters and process a lot of cheese.’ In the first chapter Kelvin arrives in London in search of power and £5,000 a year, intent on acquiring both in the manner of confidence tricks. The Fall of Kelvin Walker skirmishes around Gray’s favourite themes – politics, sexual politics and religion – without engaging any of them for very ...”

“... sons crying out to his boyfriend as he is dying was ‘enough to earn it the nickname “the gay play” in antiquity, which shows how straight most tragedies were’. Just so. The theatre in Athens, even more than the Assembly or the law courts, was the place where the problems of the day or age were explored, where efforts to shape opinion were ...”

“... occasional effective scene is bloated with rhetoric. After the family goes to the supermarket in search of oxtail to make bún bò huế and, failing to make themselves understood, return home with a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of mayonnaise, we are forced to traverse Barthes and consider that ‘our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all, but an ...”

“... Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not of despair, but of resistance, even vision’. The patricidal disaffection of Berjeman, Waugh and the Sitwells, defined in Lucas’s account as Bright Young Things, was, in contrast, little more than depressive ...”

“... in the present by describing the trouble of searching for them in the National State Public Search Room, with its uncomfortable crowds of genealogy freaks. He pretends to be amazed that women habitually give false dates and men false descriptions of their status in passports. Considering the extreme oddity and irresponsibility of his parents, which here ...”

“... the time: for him, war drives out sex. Burgess is hardly an author whom one would suppose to be in search of new sensations. It could be (I came close to thinking at one stage) that, heterosex being so awful, homosex has to be a little better. But no, Toomey doesn’t ‘glory in it’, he dislikes his fellows in sex (‘hissing, camping, simpering’), and ...”

“... Pitt-Kethley is no doubt aware of this, and one can sympathise with her in her largely futile search for female writers to provide another point of view. The Restoration brings us Aphra Behn’s Betty Flauntit, with the age-old female cry: ‘No matter for his Handsomeness, let me have him that has most money.’ But is anyone enjoying themselves? The age ...”

“... Schwarzenegger, the California governor who opposes George Bush’s position on abortion and gay marriage and the church, was chosen to give a platform speech opposing anti-war ‘girly-men’ and praising George W. Bush for having a tough and unshakeable position on Homeland Security. Homeland means a lot to Schwarzenegger: he used to be from Graz until ...”