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“... interests, much enlightenment on the Shylock question, or, by implication, on any other. In search of such enlightenment Gross trawls exhaustively through the text of the play, through its history on the stage and through its critical fortunes. The title page of the first edition mentions ‘the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew towards the said ...”

“... feed it to Oscar de la Renta’s dogs. Here’s Matthew Tinkcom. ‘Camp is the alibi for gay-inflected labour to be caught in the chain of value-coding within capitalist political economies... I would suggest that Camp is more productively seen in relation to what it says about bourgeois representation (and its tendency to exclude gays) than in ...”

“... an effect of social exclusion that was the standard lot of children who are both precocious and gay everywhere in America until recently, and probably still is outside certain major cities. Miles’s account of Burroughs’s childhood and adolescence is the last word we’ll need about this period. What’s most striking are descriptions of people and ...”

“... tension, between the observing author and the active administrator, informs his account of the search for order in post-Saddam Iraq, and makes for an eye-opening and at times enthralling book. Stewart’s stint in neo-imperial government begins with all the makings of a spoof by Evelyn Waugh. Stewart spent January 2002 tramping across ravaged Afghanistan ...”

“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... were performing just the same desperate balancing act of titillation-with-respectability in their search for readers and advertisers in 1918 as they are today. ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ was the logo of the New York Times in 1896, and over the decades it applied to British tabloids too. Some of the most appealing material (if not the ...”

“... murder of a head of state (even of a dead former head of state) on a book cover was too shocking. Gay novels are off limits.Then there is the case of Salman Rushdie. The scholar Liu Kaifang translated Midnight’s Children in 2002, but his publisher promptly got cold feet and the book was pulled. In 2015, another house bought the rights and published the ...”

“... life. Wilde took Gide to a café in a remote part of the city, Douglas having gone to Biskra in search of a boy called Ali. As tea was being prepared for them, Gide noticed ‘a marvellous youth’ at the half-opened door. ‘He remained there quite a while, one raised elbow propped up against the door-jamb, outlined against the blackness of the ...”

“... Trump, Donald’s father, was a king of Queens; the Donald became a joker in Manhattan. In search of fame and greater fortune in the big city, he set out from the family mansion with its 23 rooms, nine bathrooms and, at the front, four white columns adorned with a confected family crest. A Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce were parked in the driveway, guarded ...”

“... the only game in town. When, you wonder, will someone new turn up? If it’s true – as a famous gay male writer has suggested – that there are really only 500 people in the world and after a while one has slept with most of them, then the sapphic dating pool has got to be even smaller: eight or ten perhaps, 12 or 15 at most. It’s ...”

“... to a trolley for a lethal injection, he actually assisted the executioners in their hour-long search for a viable vein in which to place the lethal catheter. (He thought they were doctors trying to cure him.)This, coupled with Clinton’s ostentatious membership of an all-white golf-club, strikes me as a more pressing issue of morals and ...”

“... footage shot on the Old Kent Road during the 1970s shows children on the streets, and early in my search, I used to scan the little groups playing by building sites or standing at bus stops, the children under the advertising hoardings or walking past the shops, to see if any of them resembled a blond-haired boy in a photo on a family tree, a boy that a ...”

“... deranger of the senses, or ‘Hallucinogenic Poet’; and, as the lover of Paul Verlaine, the ‘Gay Poet’. Mason means myths, I think, in the sense of true stories which become more than the sum of their parts. The problem with them all, he believes, is that they ‘put too plain a face on the poems’, which are ‘vessels of indeterminacy’ and ...”

“... in the field. With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his colleague Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The ...”

“... melodrama and bathos were always close at hand. Born into a family of astonishing dysfunction (a gay father, a brittle and over-protective mother, the deplorable and never-to-be-forgiven birth-name Vivian, alcoholic and suicidal siblings) Chambers could well have become a drifter if he had not signed on at Columbia University and been noticed by Mark Van ...”