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“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... a fiction, but Burn’s inventions run in parallel with the headlines. McGovern’s situation – gay media star exposed to tabloid harassment in hospital – recalls Russell Harty’s, while his fate (savagely attacked by a casual pick-up whose image has been partially captured on a security video) has elements in common with the murders committed by Colin ...”

“... sisters set off to England for the hunting season. Nancy took Bobbie, and Phyllis took her sons Peter and Winkie; they also took horses and a governess or two, and went out with the Pytchley. Nancy met and married Waldorf Astor, who owned the Observer and was MP for Plymouth; his brother John owned the Times. The Astors were so rich that occasionally it ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings of the word also come into play – ‘distinctive features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem ...”

“... love. How to get to grips with ‘Isherwood’ (as he has chosen to address him) was a problem for Peter Parker: something that perhaps explains the 12 years this usually brisk biographer has spent on his task. A main difficulty is that Isherwood (‘I am a camera’) is himself so intent a watcher of things that inspection bounces off him. Intent and also ...”

“... set in 1960, is chauvinism and hypocrisy bingo: the anti-Semitism, the obviously (to us) closeted gay art director Sal, the onslaught of casual and structural sexism experienced by Peggy on her first day as Don’s secretary.* When he’s introduced to her, Pete says: ‘Are you Amish or something? … It wouldn’t be a sin for us to see your legs. If you ...”

“... singing voice until fifty pages in, when she decides to audition for a talent contest at a nearby gay bar. She sang Harold Arlen’s ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’; when she had finished, ‘for a minute the whole room was silent. Then everyone burst into applause.’ She won the competition. Soon she was taken to the Bon Soir nightclub on Eighth Street for an ...”

“... intellectual history. Things could only get better, and the first sign that they were doing so was Peter Gay’s magnificent study, The Enlightenment (1966). Not that Gay was unpartisan. He had fled the insanities of Nazi Germany before the war, and his ‘comprehensive interpretation’ of 18th-century thought was in ...”

“... He stood 5’2”, he was minded to distinguish right from wrong and sense from nonsense, he was gay. He was bullied during basic training and again by the other men in the discharge unit, who would all end up outside the army. But Manning was recycled. A fellow trainee, interviewed for Guardian Films last year, thought the army was desperate. I know for a ...”

“... would T.S. Eliot have made of that, his dear ghost having just survived seductions, blue poetry, gay short stories). In his prize-winning Mind Forg’d Manacles of 1987, Porter examined the history of madness in England from the Restoration to the end of the 18th century, and established that madness was a much-discussed subject, and a relatively common ...”

“... loved platonically. In fact, it would be no serious distortion to say that there is only one good gay here, and lots of bad gays. Possibly homosexuality is an extra twist of the thumbscrew Burgess customarily applies to his leading characters. Perhaps it is necessary that Toomey should be a Catholic, and a lapsed one, but lapsed for some reason other than ...”

“... and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears as co-host with Britten. The stickiness – clearly a source of great amusement to Coldstream and Spender – lay in the tensions between the lifestyles of the people concerned, and the frustration felt by Auden and Isherwood – naturally dominant ...”

“... barons). The trouble was no one in the actual Labour Party remotely resembled him. By this point, Peter Mandelson was communications director, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and Neil Kinnock – scarred by having to defend unilateral disarmament in the 1987 general election – was on the long march to respectability and another defeat in ...”

“... not as self-motivated as himself, then became the disciple of the über-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who believes that ‘freedom and democracy’ are not ‘compatible’, that it was a mistake for women to be given the right to vote, and that the future lies in colonies in space and on the oceans, free from government repression. Thiel hired Vance ...”

“... and benefits, Lord Hollick, chairman of United News and Media, to advise on industrial policy, and Peter Jarvis, Whitbread chief executive, who was asked to head the Low Pay Commission, charged with setting the rate for the planned legal minimum wage. In previous Labour administrations, it was trade-union leaders like Ernest Bevin and Frank Cousins who were ...”