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“... legacy of a belief in possibility, a belief in the expandability and perfectibility of the self. Edmund White is very much in this tradition, and remembering that helps one to understand the charm of his work, which has a lot to do with the way his creations seem to have invented themselves in accordance with a clear idea of what they want to be ...”

“... a prescription for public policy, made on the understanding that something could be done. Men in white coats should be given the funds to get back to their laboratories and defeat Aids. And ‘ought’ in the sense that we had a particular duty to a persecuted group. As well as the practical, good-housekeeping kind of ‘ought’ there was an ...”

“... like The Screens, his last play, is a work with a bewildering multiplicity of backdrops. It is, as Edmund White says in his introduction, ‘a curious mixture of memoir, tract, stylised Platonic dialogue based on actual conversation, allegorical quest, epic’; and it is about as hard to read as that makes it sound. It was written over the last three ...”

“... profession returned to the community emblazoned with technical terms. Liberated gays such as Edmund White and Martin Duberman spent years looking for a psychoanalytic cure. Nineteenth-century homosexuals were untroubled in comparison.’ This might seem horribly like the truth, were one to generalise from what Robb tells us about Magnus ...”

“... about how I myself would feel should anyone do such a thing to me.) The studio – bright white – had a great view of the Pacific Ocean. It had, as well, displayed on the walls, any number of portraits done – in colour – by Bachardy. Some of these, I noticed as I entered, were of Isherwood. (In Chris and Don, you get a good look at this ...”

“... and it relies heavily on this somewhat archaic charm. I suspect, however, that a good deal of Edmund White’s strength lies elsewhere – in an intelligence and analytic power that is at first sight rather obscured by the baroque trappings. The shadowy lover of the hero, about whom the whole book revolves, is some kind of great man ...”

“... has no taste for games, girls or money; in his new introduction to the novel, Edmund White calls him a ‘sissy’, which is about right, though, oddly, Cissy is the name of the pitiless young woman Sainty is trapped into marrying. Sturgis never makes any play on this lurking pun, though as a treacherous and neglectful wife Cissy is a ...”

“... 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 infused with the raw brashness of tongues ...”

“... and voices of the victims, that is what it feels like too. Aids starts in the 1970s. Here’s Edmund White, describing the San Francisco gay ‘look’ in his travel book States of Desire (1980). Bodies made themselves intelligible: A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the ...”

“... High to be the art director of a magazine they were starting; though it ran for only five issues, White Dove Review succeeded in attracting contributions from a number of the leaders of the country’s emerging counter-culture, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones and Robert Creeley. It also ran a selection of the early work of a maverick ...”

“... the reader through the public furores – the outcry over her 1966 pronouncement that ‘the white race is the cancer of human history,’ for example, used as a cudgel against her by conservative foes until their arms went numb – and developments in her personal life familiar from previous biographies, memoirs and profiles. While not stinting on ...”

“... Rhodes in the east, skirting round to the south of Crete. Everything to the north was European and White; everything to the south was Black or Semitic. Since the first millennium BC everything that had ever come out of Egypt or Palestine or Arabia was utterly contemptible. That was what we learned on weekdays: on Sundays Palestine became the Holy Land and St ...”

“... it, proliferates different meanings instead of choosing different acts. Symbolic richness (the white whale, the Scarlet Letter A, Walden Pond) may reconcile writers and readers to the United States or, as in Melville’s Pierre, turn back on the interpreter in a nightmare of self-referentiality that cuts words off entirely from the world. But Pierre’s ...”

“... observer and metaphor-maker – a poem on a magazine page ‘swimming in a little gel pack of white space’; a freshly laundered shirt emitting, when shaken, ‘the sound of a flag at the consulate of a small, rich country’ – Baker can be entertainingly fussy about vocabulary. ‘“Panties” is a word to be avoided, I feel,’ we’re told in The ...”

“... tragic – reflected in the reader’s responses as the narrative develops. The story is this. Edmund Sin is a Chicago-born American, of Chinese parentage. We meet him first as the sad narrator, in sight of his 60th birthday, mourning the loss of a wife he has belatedly learned to love, looking back over forty years to another self, squaring accounts with ...”