“... of stays.’ It was a question of gender roles, not anatomical ambiguity. Despite the perils of gay encounters, London was packed with male brothels. On one estimate, two thousand out of a total of five thousand knocking shops catered specially for men in search of boys. There were even bordellos specialising in ...”

“... altogether delightful book … an enchanting cast of characters, all set forth with a kind of gay, insouciant wit … the humour is infectious, the figures endearingly ridiculous and admirable human beings.’ ‘A happy book that will give pleasure to thousands,’ chimed in Mervyn Horder in the Spectator, with a prediction that was, if anything, too ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a series of techno compilation CDs. The first sold over 150,000 copies.Ecstasy was common in gay clubs in New York in the 1980s but its use didn’t become widespread until the mid-1990s: the amount seized by law enforcement agencies increased a hundredfold between 1993 and 1999. In America, recent Ecstasy evangelists have included hip hop stars such as ...”

“... in nutritional anthropology. It takes the cherished theme of a brilliant and independent woman’s search for a male partner worthy of her, and transplants it to a utopian matriarchal community in Botswana. For a man to recast Pride and Prejudice as a modern, feminist love affair, and then to set it in Africa, is a bold move, and neither the book’s reworking ...”

“... association. Both biographies share an aversion to the twice-told tale (by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay) of an Enlightenment Freud dutiful and dauntless in the stables of irrationality. The new biographers have turned away from prelapsarian universals. Rather than insulate his thought from its darker strains, they side emphatically with his fallibilistic ...”

“... craft of writing (‘What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition or the search for meaning?’), and by the end of seven years studying the plots of European novels from Cervantes to Pushkin to Tolstoy to Proust to Henry James, she is more sure than ever that the truth about the human condition lies in books:I no longer believed that ...”

“... the passing of the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, describing her childhood friendship with a gay boy.Adichie has to perform a balancing act between these different audiences. Whose standards should she be held to? And what makes a proper feminist? In a blog post, Omelogor describes a ‘famous academic feminist’: ‘She didn’t like women. She liked ...”

“... Glass, Irony and God (1995) and Autobiography of Red (1998), a mysterious narrative poem about a gay teenager who is also the ‘red monster’ Geryon of Greek myth. Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), was a playful study in prose of Sappho, Plato, the limitless nature of desire and the origin of the alphabet. The essay – capaciously ...”

“... desire for a male who will ‘accept’ him sexually. He is nothing if not a trier. His forty-year search for that creature has not slowed down. He is probably still, as he writes this book, maybe even as he reads this review (well, it’s basically favourable), engaging in delightful/disturbing/lacerating encounters. He writes with distaste of ‘...”

“... sandwiches, and this fact further complicates things. It was Grandma who first suggested the search for a love medicine. But Grandma also denies that she has any Indian blood – though surely she must have, thinks Lipsha, gifted as she is with second sight, having seen a catastrophe to come ‘in the polished-up tin of her bread toaster’. Which modern ...”

“... deviations from heterosexuality: a limited range of acts is licensed for men clearly labelled as gay and inferior. It turns out these acts are not only convenient but addictive.The police beat up suspects as a matter of course, all the more fiercely when the guilty party hasn’t succeeded in finding the treasure thought to belong to a murder victim. The ...”

“... She can talk to Frank more easily than to Tony; they would make a good match but for his being gay. As it is, he’s generous enough not just to have promised to sponsor Rosella at university but to give Eilis two thousand dollars towards a trip to Ireland – her first since Rose’s death.Ostensibly she’s going back for her mother’s eightieth ...”

“... unwilling to acknowledge that promiscuity (not homosexuality) is the cause, has singled out the gay community as a scapegoat. How then should artists and writers react to the current measures designed to exclude works which ‘promote homosexuality’ from our schools, libraries and theatres? For an answer, we might turn back to Spender’s World within ...”