“... it is the role of the angel to wander about the stage chatting not very usefully to the sick gay hero, and it seems that the main task of angels nowadays is ‘to reassure Americans’. How have things come to this pass? The American angel is not in its true nature insipid. It has a grand ancestry. The prophet Enoch was taken up by God and made into the ...”

“... pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or too aggressive in a country town’) and building types. There were passages from Ruskin, odds and ends in a section called Marginalia and plenty of good humour. Alongside the crisp black and white photographs of pristine new buildings were colour ...”

“... and close friend Robert Liddell engaged in a somewhat demeaning rummage in Burke and Crockford in search of distinguished Compton-Burnetts whether living or dead and gone, he was astonished to discover none at all. Both Burnetts and Comptons had in fact been farm labourers not many generations back, and Mrs Spurling thinks that Ivy must have been about thirty ...”

“... an alcoholic mother. Chloe, his probation officer, reckons it’s ‘conceivable he just might be gay but doesn’t know it’. This is patronising shit. Chloe’s as bad as Graef in her condescension about what the boys do and do not know – though it is clear they know little of Aids transmission and often scoff at the idea of condom-use. Johnnie is ...”

“... prison. Dissident Gardens is populated by a gallery of similar outcasts: Cicero Lookins, an obese, gay, black professor of cultural studies at a small liberal arts college in Maine; Sergius Gogan, the orphaned son of Miriam Zimmer Angrush and a failed protest singer, who works as a music teacher at a Quaker boarding school; and Miriam’s cousin Lenny, short ...”

“... been to find ‘Lost Hearts’ or ‘The Residence at Whitminster’ included in an anthology of gay ghost stories, but both would certainly deserve their place, especially the latter. How much was James aware of the vibrations? How far did he intend them? ‘Reticence,’ he said, ‘may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view ...”

“... To Bill Alland, a longtime Mercury colleague (Thompson in Citizen Kane, the shadowy reporter in search of Rosebud), it explains Welles’s difficulty memorising lines. Never quite knowing his lines prevented Welles from inhabiting a character, or ‘surrendering’ to it. ‘If he ever let himself go in a part he’d lose control,’ Alland ...”

“... who had ever tempted him from his love of music. But that overlooks the fact that Thomson was gay, something he carefully, almost pathologically, sought to conceal all his life. Anthony Tommasini, in his recent biography of the composer, has dismissed the entire affair as a fabrication on Thomson’s part, and Blondel may be too ready to accept the story ...”

“... opposed the landmark bills legalising abortion and making divorce easier; she doesn’t support gay marriage or the right of gay couples to adopt. At the same time, she has been a vocal defender of social welfare programmes, criticising today’s politicians and her church for paying more attention to policing individual ...”

“... history was profound, and he knew it. He had an almost photographic memory and was perpetually in search of styles to delight his eye. He was celebrated, too, for his sweetness and rigour, unpretentiousness and uncorruptible professional ethics – none of these common currency in his milieu. When he writes in Fashion Climbing that the ‘principal ...”

“... doodads hanging off every belt-loop – made his athletic descent from the House galleries in search of the satanic Pence and Pelosi accompanied by his squat, shouting, red-white-and-blue-bandanna-wearing mother. Give ’em hell, Mommy! We’ll hog-tie and hang ’em!And finally – we shouldn’t go there but we can’t help it – the guy in Viking ...”

“... network with prospective employers, and offer moral support. The buzz in the halls was that search committees were gentler and kinder this time – there were fewer trick questions or harsh interrogations. Kind or cruel, there are not enough jobs to go around, and everyone thinks there never will be, as predictions of a wave of faculty retirements in ...”

“... to another neighbour, Arturo, who retired to the country with his lover Fabio, and set up a gay marriage of the most correct, not to say prissy kind – and has been even more coolly and spectacularly cheated. He had put the house, on which they’d lavished so much care, in Fabio’s name to avoid tax – Fabio’s bright idea – and now the traitor ...”

“... had a steady job in his father’s business, distrusted the Wordsworths. True, Tom had a bit of a gay crush on Sam and wanted to keep him to himself, but he was a real family friend, always ready with the odd spot of cash, kindness itself to Sara, who was very fond of him and whom he admired in a tactfully chivalrous sort of way. But the real bitch was the ...”

“... who showed him the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science. Auden also discovered the gay bars of Berlin. Through Layard he became acquainted with the revolutionary teachings of the American psychologist Homer Lane. Auden invited his friend Isherwood to join him in Berlin. Thirty-five years later, in his autobiography Christopher and his ...”