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“... leaving her in imminent danger of being convicted of poisoning her worthless ex-lover. Lord Peter Wimsey, whimsically love-struck and coming to the rescue, confronts the real villain: Yes, well, about this arsenic. As you know, it’s not good for people in a general way, but there are some people – those tiresome peasants in Styria one hears so much ...”

“... shameful imaginings’). This time there’s a plot: the young (white) lesbian wife of a grand, gay (white) Southern poet runs off with her infant daughter and conceals herself from his inquiries by passing as a black lone parent. The racial caste system in rural Virginia being what it is, the blonde daughter, Karen, grows up not only thinking of herself as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The translators there are Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson.The afterlife of Scott Moncrieff’s 1922-30 version is interesting too. First, not all of it is his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas ...”

“... the Koch brothers, who seem determined to repeal the New Deal; the anti-immigrant extremists Peter Brimelow and Stephen Miller; climate change deniers; adherents of gun culture; and Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr, who has blamed increased toleration of gay men and lesbians for the supposed moral ...”

“... were, to a lad, left out. In the summer the British Art Show arrived in London. In the meantime, Peter Fuller had died in a car crash. Fuller never lived to type out the words ‘Damien Hirst’. He died before the Turner Prize began to favour younger artists, before Saatchi started collecting the new art of the Nineties. But his is still a spectral presence ...”

“... of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist awakening’ in the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Admiralty’s dogma that ‘the best guarantee for the peace of the world is a supreme British fleet’ became the leading edge of Imperial ...”

“... Times; another printed alongside Allan Gurganus’s obituary in the Advocate, a glossy American gay and lesbian mag usually devoted to pulchritudinous gym bunnies, gay sitcom stars and treatments for flesh-eating strep. It seemed the least I could do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... those paintings where the painter, like his brother, conjured up an Ireland both ‘terrible and gay’. For painter, poet and ex-revolutionary, such visions supplied a kind of compensation. English has had unique access to O’Malley’s papers in private hands as well as to the large archive in University College, Dublin, and has written a fascinating ...”

“... is very much the approach of Billy Lee Brammer’s ‘classic American political novel’, The Gay Place, first published in 1961 and now republished in Britain.4 Lord Harlech epitomises the method in his foreword: ‘We see and we feel how that world makes and breaks men and women both in their public life and in their private life.’ Another way of ...”

“... Ayrton. In the dark background are the diabolic Bernard Van Dieren and Philip Heseltine (‘Peter Warlock’), two men, composer-writers like himself, to whom Lambert maintained a fierce loyalty, before and after their deaths. Lambert’s cardinal importance in the establishment of the Vic-Wells, later the Royal Ballet, is valuably stressed by ...”

“... himself by dressing up in drag, replete with false eyelashes and perfume, in order to hang around gay bars and make fun of gays who tried to pick him up. He was deeply enthused by every form of sexual excess and deviation, sado-masochism, Black Masses and whatever other sorts of mystic nonsense were on offer. Most of his time was spent boozing and ...”

“... who’s seen giving ‘his best imitation of a guileless smile’ – he makes the character gay, perhaps to take the edge of eccentric wilfulness off his advanced sense of camp. Willis (as everyone calls him) in Preston Falls, the most lifelike of Gates’s nightmare husbands, is more the Merle Haggard type. A man with literary ambitions of some kind in ...”

“... poet was a persona, and the sonnets to the young man no more implied that Shakespeare was gay than Macbeth implied that he was a murderer. Of course, in an age in which it is being argued that Internet pornography featuring virtual sex with computer-generated minors should be a prosecutable offence, claiming that Shakespeare was a pederast only in his ...”