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“... 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 ...”

“... as an active revolutionary. His politics remained implacably Republican, but he had embarked on a search for intellectual and personal fulfilment, both of which eluded him. Post-revolutionary Ireland was never comfortable with him, nor he with it: a central theme of Richard English’s absorbing study is O’Malley’s ambivalence towards Irish pieties, and ...”

“... come from?’ For a fleeting moment, two years later, as they manned the barricades of the rue Gay-Lussac, daubed their slogans on walls across the Left Bank and engaged the enemy in the Paris streets, the Situationists understandably thought of themselves as the avatars of high postwar revolutionary theory. Since 1968 the literature on the Situationist ...”

“... She stopped what she was doing and looked at him. ‘We need another fridge,’ she said. They search through newspaper advertisements for something they can afford. Sandy sees that they must go to a type of auction sale that her husband feels to be demeaning. She turns away to prepare a meal, and when she looks at him again it is to find that not only the ...”

“... he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the morning. They’re wrong. I nearly died in an ...”

“... in a dramatic week for freedom in America. The Supreme Court had ruled five to four in favour of gay marriage; at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Obama had drawn on the cadences of the Southern black church, in perhaps the most powerful speech of his presidency, and invited his audience to join him in singing ‘Amazing ...”

“... the best young Russian writers – including M.A. Kuzmin, a predatory but thrillingly rebellious gay who roped the young Mirsky and his friends into a homoerotic salon. Politically, Dmitry had no time for the doomed efforts to turn Russia into a constitutional state. As Smith puts it, he ‘never seems to have written or done anything to suggest that he ...”

“... ever more awkward and dangerous situations – preferably involving ‘sinister’ men – in her search for ‘my own little idea of salvation’; Mrs Copperfield, on a trip to Panama that’s in the loosest sense a parody of the Bowles honeymoon, leaves her husband for a local prostitute called Pacifica. Though there’s an apparent parallel between the ...”

“... moments of narrative tension, which then lodge the book’s apparently minor characters – a gay junkie, a celebrity profiler, a flailing PR executive – more securely in the reader’s memory. People who would only be allowed bit roles in a longer, intricately plotted novel kaleidoscopically emerge as figures in their own right. Egan exposes her ...”

“... his third passion, which both continued and contradicted his Modernist and Pop beliefs, was his search for an architecture autre – ‘other’ in the anti-classical, almost ‘raw’ sense of the art autre or art brut advocated by Jean Dubuffet and others in the 1950s. The Brutalism of the Smithsons and Stirling presented such an architecture for ...”

“... as a single woman, published in the St James Chronicle in 1763, was entitled ‘Imagination’s Search after Happiness’. It therefore seemed natural to her to use her talents to charm her distant new husband, ‘so Instead of Dressing showily, or behaving usefully – I sate at home and wrote Verses.’ But Thrale wasn’t impressed and Johnson stepped ...”

“... leaves little doubt that dancing has long been the target of state repression, especially when gay or Black people are doing it. The founding legend of rave concerns the ‘Ibiza Four’: the DJs Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, who in 1987 went on holiday to Ibiza, took Ecstasy under the stars at the open-air club ...”

“... which the emotion appears to be hidden, to lurk mysteriously in the space between the words. The search for pure accuracy in her poems forced her to watch the world helplessly, as though there were nothing she could do. The statements she made in her poems seem always distilled, put down on the page – despite the simplicity and the tone of casual ...”

“... among the privileged – the CIA under Obama set up a recruiting office at the Miami Beach Gay Pride parade. Overt racism and homophobia had become taboo, even as imprisonment or premature death removed 1.5 million black men from public life. Diversification and multiculturalism among upwardly mobile, college-educated elites went together with mass ...”

“... so coolly or callously, and so at odds with what we know of his own quiet lifestyle that led Peter Gay to describe Burckhardt as an intellectual voluptuary. The founders of the new history may have seen a foreshadowing in Burckhardt, but it was Durkheim they modelled themselves on. The latter’s objective approach, which demanded a hard society of hard social ...”