“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I wanted to understand. Would I ever understand it? Nothing was less certain.’ He pursues this search for inner enlightenment. In eastern Ukraine, he accompanies a punitive raid on a ‘partisan’ village, during which his colleague brains a newborn baby. He moves to Poltava, watching street hangings of Russians with interest and anguish. In Kharkov, he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I suppose, in the fact that I had known these people and liked them and in the fact that I was gay. The word being used to describe them was ‘paedophile’, which struck me as wrong. They were simply gay; they had believed that their homosexuality, in all its teenage confusion, was a vocation to the priesthood. Whereas ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the other is full of academics who are administered a small electric shock if they say the word ‘gay’. If all of Cather’s biographers were crowded into the same place, they would be understood to be suffering from some form of mass ergotism. In my reading, I so frequently encountered people stepping on rakes that I began humming the ‘You have died of ...”

“... and they knew the value of a stunt. A quiet news day at the Mail nowadays is taken up with the search for people to punish, or ‘name and shame’, as if that alone could lift the spirits, but it wasn’t always like that. A couple of hacks I know who worked for the Express years ago were determined to get the words ‘moist gusset’ into the ...”

“... to establish some form of control over the worst of the addictive and destructive user-to-user and search services that have rendered old-style pornographic publications all but obsolete. The last schoolboy with copies of Playboy under his bed must be drawing his pension by now.Until it was abolished by the 1959 legislation, the keynote common law ...”

“... sickening in their ceaseless complaint about the appropriation of ‘that fine old English word “gay” ’. (They never objected to the borrowing of that even finer old English word ‘queer’, which had to be re-appropriated by people like Tom.) But there was something grim and lugubrious in Tom’s life, which he very often exposed in bursts of self-pity ...”

“... study, found his written instructions, dutifully carried them out before the inevitable search by the police, then fainted. When I went back to Japan alone later in 1970, the Mishimas invited me out for the evening and he insisted on going to Dracula coffee house, which had just opened. He had a habit of systematically trying out every new ...”

“... a general-purpose dictionary for English-speakers around the world? I fear it does not. A random search in it for various items that are in COD reveals OAD’s lack of the Teuton twins Weltschmerz and Weltanschauung and the musical pair aleatoric and serial. The good news is that OAD has the newer sense of environmentalist, ‘a person who seeks to protect ...”

“... the early 1950s, as Parker calculates, he had had some four hundred partners; this was before the gay liberation movement – for whom in old age Isherwood was a favourite uncle – made such athleticism less remarkable, and long before Aids made it risky. His longest relationship was with Don Bachardy, a partner thirty years younger than he was. Parker ...”

“... enough blankets for all the detainees; she went hungry and was forced to undergo an invasive body search. She repeatedly asked to be allowed to buy a ticket home – she had the money – but was refused. Burke counts herself lucky, though: she had nannied for the BBC presenter Jenny Kleeman, who wrote about her case; her friends and family campaigned for her ...”

“... with depression and begun to settle on a career. The previous decade had been spent in a restive search for a vocation that was frequently punctuated by bouts of ill-health and thoughts of suicide. Having renounced his ambition to be a painter, he had devoted himself, intermittently, to the pursuit of chemistry, comparative anatomy and physiology; enrolled ...”