“... 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 ...”

“... Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As Peter Jacobs writes, it supplied a model of ‘a pagan liberty and a savage beauty, combined with a stylised severity or formal purity’, a liberty and a beauty embodied, one might add, in Nijinsky’s legs, to gaze on which Keynes briefly abandoned his Treatise ...”

“... but from Habermas, Lawrence Klein, Howard Caygill, Terry Eagleton and Bakhtin, as restated by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The result is both fashionably cultural-materialist and safely old art-historical, supposing paintings to be socially determined primarily by discursive texts of the sort art historians require to explain an artist’s ...”

“... forty-year-old often skint but always cadging mother, Helen. Other characters were added later. Peter, the louche businessman with a ‘wallet full of reasons’ to lure Helen offstage and into a brief marriage for the play’s middle sections. Jimmie, the charming ‘coloured naval rating’ who keeps Jo company over Christmas and leaves her pregnant. And ...”

“... places. The sequences featuring three eventually famous friends, James Prior of Northern Ireland, Peter May of England, one of its cricket captains, and William Rees-Mogg, late of the Times, are among the tightest and funniest things he has written. May is present, while utterly silent, as a batsman of genius, and as a figure of fun and a pillar of rectitude ...”

“... lives? What can they tell their children? The answer, according to the interviews carried out by Peter Sichrovsky, would appear to be nothing. Again and again, the respondents in Strangers in their Own Land describe the impossibility of talking to their parents; in some cases they know nothing at all of their parents’ lives before 1945. These are the ...”

“... self-destructive, stripped of family, a figure who slides towards pathos and even absurdity (Peter Sellers as moustache-twitching Gallic ingénu). At the beginning of the trail, the central event has already happened; the detective, divested of any power to abort or determine, can only reconstruct, seeking an origin, an ‘answer’. The genre is ...”

“... frank and factual as I can make it’ – and attained heroic stature among the newly militant gay community, particularly strong on the West Coast of America. In the Huntington’s otherwise extensive press release there was no reference to Isherwood’s being gay, or to the left-wing politics of his early years. In ...”

“... heard him attack the Wilson government’s nervous dealings with Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. Openly gay men and women were less easily happened on – Livingstone reckons he had met no more than four or five by his late twenties – but he was untroubled when the Gay Liberation Front encouraged many more to declare themselves ...”

“... then you are very probably a patriarchal racist Christian nationalist nutjob, and also secretly gay. She is probing your unconscious, remember, and understands you better than you do yourself. Or perhaps – and this is about as charitable as it gets – you are simply a naive and credulous fool, for whom getting in a moral panic about ...”

“... eggs, others preferred to call them poached. Either way, any attempt to describe the appearance of Peter Lorre must deal with those eyes. What teeth are to Julia Roberts and lips to Angelina Jolie, his bulging eyes were to Peter Lorre, his unavoidable calling card and a feature quite out of proportion with the norm. He ...”

“... as ‘frequent sodomy with his own wife’. Despite the risk of being burned alive, however, the gay subculture, centred on barbers’ shops, was, we learn, ‘more public and perhaps more widespread’ in 15th-century Venice than ever before. Ruggiero seems to know the Venetian judicial records well and he asks some searching questions. He pays attention to ...”

“... unpredictable: very smart, a very good speaker and debater, and stylishly and quite flamboyantly gay. He lived in Rotterdam, in the so-called Palazzo di Pietro (it is now possible to enjoy a virtual tour of the house at www.palazzodipietro.nl), and campaigned for election in 2002 in his chauffeur-driven Daimler, always accompanied by two King Charles ...”

“... Kubrick’s Lolita, handsomely set up by the director and beautifully spun out by the actor. Peter Sellers, as the creepy and protean Clare Quilty, has struck up a conversation with James Mason, as Humbert Humbert. The latter is in no mood for any kind of conversation, since he is just marking time before he returns to his hotel room to have sex, as he ...”

“... Gielgud, and with many of his friends. As these biographies agree, many theatrical people were gay, from top management down, and their response to the law was not defiance, much less agitation for reform, but reticence. Reticence cannot have been very difficult, their world being so enclosed; danger lay in forbidden excursions from it, and even then, one ...”