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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ‘...”

“... gave it no more thought. But when she had not arrived back by the following day, he started to search for her. Crommelin began searching on Wednesday. He found Mary’s body on the same day, on the Jersey side of the Hudson River, in a spot named the Elysian Fields. The body had been dredged from the river. It was severely bruised and bloodied at the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of jolly books with titles like The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit and The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis, not to mention The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Kahuna and The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth. The narrator addresses us as ‘my faithful readers’ or ‘my young readers’, adopts a verbose and patronising diction to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to examine the Byzantine mosaics of the empress in the church of San Vitale. One result of this search for authenticity was that towering, ‘double-eagle crown, studded with real amethysts, opals and turquoises’ in which she subsequently posed, half-nude, for a series of smouldering publicity photographs. Nor, Herr Doktor, should one omit to ...”

“... it were, the membranes of inscrutable reserve: Climbing with shoeless feet the polished stairs, Gay were the evenings in that house I’d known. The mats are swept, the cushions that are chairs Surround the table like a lacquer throne. The geisha have been booked by telephone, The whisky brought, the raw fish on the ice, The green tea boiled, the saké in ...”