“... called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still ...”

“... him).Brando was right, judging by the 2004 movie version of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford. The film itself is a pedestrian and pretty adaptation that can’t quite decide where it stands on the antisemitism of the main characters, but Pacino is an excellent Shylock, emphasising the character’s furious dignity in the face of ...”

“... and adventure’ were absent. Being funny is not part of the reputation of either of them. But Frank Kermode went so far as to call Diana the writer ‘among other things, a comedian’, and we can ask how many ardent anti-communists would say about Trotsky, as Diana did: ‘He was such an intellectual … he wrote such good prose; and he made fun of ...”

“... Robert Altman’s Short Cuts is a long, loose-looking movie, but the looseness is an effect, carefully worked for. Plenty of themes recur throughout – insecurity, chance, rage, damage, the long, bruising war between men and women – and although there are fourteen or fifteen stories here (based on extrapolated from ten stories by Raymond Carver – the handouts and the introduction solemnly say nine stories and a poem, but the so-called poem is also a prose narrative), they are intricately stitched together, like a miniaturised Comédie humaine set in Los Angeles ...”

“... considered the grandfather of the musical, an ‘adroit balancing act between seriousness and frank frivolity’ that will inform almost all musical theatre in the following century. And by addressing two very different influences, the minstrel show and the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, he refocuses our thoughts on the origins of the musical. His ...”

“... with all sides of the argument, the dramatis personae will take trouble with him, and even be frank with him. For those who wish to follow the ramifications of Belgrano-Ponting, the Guardian is the paper, and Norton-Taylor the correspondent. It by no means follows, of course, that a superb journalist will write a successful book. Some have written ...”

“... trite’; ‘a true autobiography of a second-rate soul’. Henry bolted again, this time to join Frank, his younger brother, who was growing tomatoes in Guernsey. They impressed OUP with a translation of Lucian, and from then on were virtually full-time employees of the Press. Next came The King’s English (1906), which provided some of the content for the ...”

“... than something to be envied; in the heyday of ‘lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals’ (Frank O’Hara), the New Yorker was not viewed as a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylisation as a ‘poet by default’: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it ...”

“... miserable days in the witness box, the Home Office scientist who had conducted the Griess test, Dr Frank Skuse, was obliged to revise his trial testimony again and again. He could produce no notes of the ingredients he had used in the tests after the men were arrested. In one case, he agreed he had made a miscalculation which left him with a figure a hundred ...”

“... helicopter company, discerning, as he does so, a campaign to discredit her Secretary for Defence, Michael Heseltine, who subsequently resigned. He claims, moreover, that she again misled the Commons over the American use of British bases to bomb Libya, and he sees her influence behind the police raids on BBC premises in Glasgow in the wake of the uproar over ...”

“... will undermine our system of government, and make participants in government less prepared to give frank if unpopular advice. People might take the opposite view: that if one could only be sure of being reported five years later, it might add incentive to the delivery of frank and unpopular advice. I have in mind one of ...”

“... Guggenheim on Central Park, another masterpiece of late modernist building-as-sculpture created by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959, was suspended. But now the Metropolitan Museum has taken over the old Whitney for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, and, at least for the time being, the building, renamed the Breuer, looks much as its architect conceived ...”

“... typescript, 1951) Jack Kerouac, ‘The Slouch Hat’ (c.1960) John Cohen, ‘Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Gregory Corso’ (1959) Wallace Berman, Untitled (Allen Ginsberg, c.1960)PreviousNext These names belong to the original small group of friends who met in New York in the early 1940s. Within ten years Ginsberg had moved to San Francisco and ...”

“... flawed. Medical politics have always been, and remain, far more ambiguous. This is deftly shown in Frank Mort’s Dangerous Sexualities, a survey of sexual policing in England since the accession of Victoria. Focus initially upon the Early Victorian years, he suggests, and you see what appears to be an irresistible alliance of doctors, experts, reformers and ...”

“... thinking, to deduce x: the identity of the murderer. Take, by way of concrete illustration, Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging (1936). The president in question is Dr Josiah Umpleby, head of St Anthony’s College, Oxbridge (not to be confused with St Antony’s, Oxford, which wasn’t founded till 1950; Innes’s setting is a ...”