“... to look for ways of remaining unapologetically gay writers without writing ‘gay novels’. Michael Cunningham won a large readership with The Hours, in which gay lives featured without being allowed to predominate, though his touch seems less sure in his most recent offering, By Nightfall. A narrative about a married man’s brief and inconclusive ...”

“... other writers.’ As Gelpi rightly points out, Day Lewis did always have his defenders. Early on, Michael Roberts claimed that From Feathers to Iron (1931) was ‘a landmark, in the sense in which Leaves of Grass, A Shropshire Lad, Des Imagistes and The Waste Land were landmarks’. And on the occasion of his death, Kingsley Amis declared that Day ...”

“... it in economy is infra dig: ‘It’s not the food, it’s the sort of people.’ Another Tory, Michael Mates, spells it out: ‘He doesn’t want to meet his constituents.’ Coverage of Mullin during the expenses hoo-ha dwelt on his black-and-white telly, when other members were blagging plasma screens the size of ...”

“... for the patria’ – the words inscribed on monuments to the Nationalist war dead, as recorded in Michael Richards’s excellent monograph After the Civil War.* The defeated Republican half of Spain was commonly referred to in the press as ‘the Red horde’. Hundreds of thousands of them were killed by Nationalist paramilitaries in a largely planned attempt ...”

“... leg of a dead Moor. The man awoke to find himself healed, but for the rest of his life, he had one white leg and one black. Not all miracles healed. The saints could also liberate prisoners, bring rain or fair weather, give children to the barren and bring about victory in combat or in court. But when scorned, they wrought ferocious miracles of ...”

“... watching his daughter Flavia beneath a ‘dark and contingent cedar tree … sitting on a white wooden seat, in her unutterable otherness, her pet marmoset on her shoulder, her cap of auburn hair shining like burnished gold on her head. Nearer to the house, in the rose-garden, their younger daughter, seven-year-old Perdita, strange, mysterious and ...”

“... alliances, Fit an apartment for your eastern hostage, extol in basalt Your father, praise with white festoons the goddess your lady; And for your death which will be mine prepare An encasement as if of solid blood.Whether or not such buildings and monuments end up being commissioned and built, the speaker is able to present his identity and art as ...”

“... to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. He would like to have written Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Threaded into each of his plays is a coded tribute: an MP in Dirty Linen, a clerk in The Invention of Love and two characters in Leopoldstadt are all called Chamberlain, doffing their caps to Stoppard’s long-term assistant, Jacky ...”

“... for their own names. Indeed, this has been a central function of indexes since the great days of white male writers, when William F. Buckley sent Norman Mailer a copy of his book The Unmaking of a Mayor and wrote ‘Hi!’ in the index next to Mailer’s name. Job’s comforters will want to be the first to tell you that the entry for ‘clocks and ...”

“... primitive banks and setting up grey markets with the tacit approval of royal officials. And, as Michael Kwass showed in his brilliant Contraband (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 January 2015), where legal workarounds failed, criminal gangs stepped in with huge smuggling operations.Fashionable clothing was just one of the products flooding into urban ...”

“... gateLovely aerial beetles of wonderful scintillateStrangest interest, and puffs of soft purest white –Soaking light, dispersing colouring for fancy’s delight.Of Maconachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester’s Stephens;Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evensOf trench foodKate Kennedy thinks he was equally talented in words and music: ‘The only ...”

“... Poets Press, which would go on to publish around thirty books, including titles by Clive Matson, Michael McClure and John Ashbery as well as Audre Lorde’s collection The First Cities.Despite her centrality to the community of artists and writers on the Lower East Side, di Prima’s work was never afforded the same respect as her fellow male ...”

“... This seems to have been the fate of almost all the cruise ships stranded by Covid border closures.Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin tell the horror story of another plague ship, the Zaandam, owned and operated by Holland America, which left Buenos Aires on 6 March 2020. The cruise ship companies already knew that their vessels were hothouses for the ...”

“... These limitations become more apparent when Hitchens writes about the Left. He tears into Michael Foot for his ‘treacly exaggerations’, his awful sentimentality, his Beaverbrook-worship and his ‘glutinous style’. Fine. But the fact that his general angle of attack on Foot is from the left, and his judgment that Foot ‘has never been otherwise ...”

“... with millions of ordinary families’. It comes as no surprise to find that he proposed the ‘white heat of technology’ wheeze to Wilson as a campaign theme for 1964, though Crossman’s own ignorance of scientific matters was as near-complete as one could wish. From 1964 to 1970 we all know the story – the fetishisation of sterling, the corporate ...”