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“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”

“... a hole, laid down some perforated cardboard over it, and ‘selected a favourite picture’. ‘Peter turned around. I got down on the ground, checked to see if he was looking, took my dick out of my trousers, and fucked the wet black hole.’ Around the same age I also bought copies of the Sun with my friends, as well as the Star and the People. It may ...”

“... Early on in this book there is a photograph of the British architect Peter Cook’s living-room ‘circa 1970’. Cook is now Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but influential schemes for futuristic ‘walking’ buildings and ‘plug-in’ cities ...”

“... me it had been something.’ There in a concise formulation is the speaking silence of so many gay lives of that era. But far less problematic scenes and social encounters are rarely described in much detail, and Forster has little interest in the diary as a sustained narrative. The occasions when he makes the hardest effort are seldom the most ...”

“... powering the gorgeous prescience and horror of William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, only to peter out, pretty much, by the mid-1990s, as the dull commercial reality – the real ‘consensual hallucination’, to repurpose Gibson’s phrase – of internet shopping kicked in. There was also, after 1977, the Star Wars problem, and the visual similarity ...”

“... There were paintings of card parties inspired by his youthful canvases, typically featuring a gay pink plume against a buff wall. Even more of them imitated the grimmer scenes he adopted in the second half of his career, in which a scrawny arm and corrugated brow are sharply lit against deep shadow. His art was subjected to stern strictures by some of the ...”

“... because of the tonal structure as much as for any other reason. ‘It seems astonishing,’ writes Peter Gradenwitz after offering his readers a ponderous analysis of West Side Story, ‘and may even perhaps appear unnecessary to regular show-business habitués, that it is possible to dissect and analyse the music of a Broadway show in the same way as a ...”

“... Mr Justice Cantley, whose outrageously biased speech (in favour of the defence) was satirised by Peter Cook in the character of Justice Cocklecarrot. In the 1980s, Carman took on a series of high-profile criminal cases. He successfully defended Dr Leonard Arthur, who had been charged with murder when he deliberately left a Down’s syndrome child to starve ...”

“... dubious R.A. Caton, who was perhaps deceived by its title into thinking it might align with the gay erotica his press also issued. Prince, by all accounts, didn’t protest much about his reputation’s slide. While a sense of being antagonistic to contemporary poetic orthodoxies fuelled, in different ways, the poetics of both Ashbery and Hill, Prince was ...”

“... demands on human subjects that are too much to bear. Rereading the famous biographies – Jones, Peter Gay, Max Schur – I was now struck by just how exposed and vulnerable Freud was to the ills, major and petty, of the times, and by the fierce contrasts in his moods between blindness and insight, equanimity and dismay. Freud was articulate about what ...”

“... of every sketch was people dying.’ Nonetheless, it was undoubtedly a strong influence on Peter Cook (one of the original cast members) and the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that ...”

“... books have added to their allure by an aggressive approach to some of the last few taboos: gay sex (particularly when allied to violence and/or manipulation); violence (particularly when allied to manipulation and/or sex); scatology. In Depraved Indifference, the sex is straight (if nasty), the violence is delayed, and the shit is more or less tidied ...”

“... to Sappho’s being established, along with Cavafy, as one of the Greek world’s most striking gay icons. In this connection, the notorious unreliability of ancient Greek biographical details – the earlier the author, current wisdom has it, the less credible the guesses – has been a godsend, since it has allowed critics both to reject anything they ...”

“... never knowingly participate in projects in which workers are mistreated, will never betray its gay employees for the sake of a contract.‘No, no, no,’ he said in an aggressively friendly manner. ‘We would never compromise our values. The best way we can effect change is by participating in projects in these countries. We must be an example.’ The ...”

“... digesting the Times at the Reform or Athenaeum, before sorting out the world’s evils. But as Peter Clark, Britain’s leading urban historian, notes in a characteristically fact-packed but thoughtful study, that most English of institutions was going strong long before then. Indeed, Sam Johnson’s beloved ‘clubbable’ men must have been in clover in ...”