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“... is stranger, given the American right’s swivel-eyed homophobia. A surprising number of gay men top the Trumpist pyramid (Peter Thiel, for instance, or the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent) and others lurk on its digital outskirts, but O’Neill isn’t one of them. He obviously didn’t believe his statements undermined his ...”

“... devotion’. His essay was written around 1932, a long time before any clear view emerged of the gay writer’s place in literary tradition, and before the idea emerged that Irish, Jewish or gay (or, later, South American) writing was itself the centre rather than the periphery renewing the centre. Borges was, in many ...”

“... were found in his body. In effect, two investigations were running side by side: as well as the search for anyone who knew anything about Christopher’s death, there was a kind of posthumous manhunt for Christopher himself. Who was he? How had he wound up like this? A man of 20 has been charged with his murder and remanded in custody, having agreed to be ...”

“... of straight people.’ The unnamed narrator of Greenwell’s first two books responds to other gay writers in a similar way. He assigns his students Frank O’Hara ‘primarily for his joy, his freedom from guardedness and guilt’. But Greenwell’s own qualities aren’t necessarily those of his idols. Although he describes ...”

“... side?Christodora may bear a (real) building’s name, but the book itself seems still to be in search of a principle of construction. Despite the prominence of the Christodora in the title and the opening passages, this isn’t one of those novels that represents a building as a world in miniature, in the manner of books as different as Alaa Al-Aswany’s ...”

“... a faith in naivety, in never knowing beforehand what is going to matter to you, or why. When In Search of Lost Time is not a book about and inspired by disillusionment, it is a great book about the wonders of curiosity. Proust was interested in the aristocracy partly because he was curious about the people who seemed to be the least curious about those ...”

“... time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old,’ Mendelsohn begins The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, ‘it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry.’ These people were his old Jewish relatives in Miami Beach, and they would cry because he reminded them so much of his great-uncle ...”

“... His career at first was defined by his personal beauty; he was the bobby-soxers’ dreamboat, a gay guy for the straight eye. Karl Malden declared that ‘he had the face of a saint,’ an especially poignant compliment when we consider that it was spoken by a man with the face of a heavy-drinking Cabbage Patch doll. Clift made relatively few films, but ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel is a spoiled gift which, as an ugly baby makes us search for deficiencies in its attractive parents, forces us to reconsider its creator’s talents. That Hollinghurst possesses great talents is certainly not in question. There is probably no novelist alive with such a deeply historical feeling for English poetic lyricism ...”

“... way. A few weeks earlier, in her column on 30 March, Dowd had referred to the efforts to demonise gay priests as a way for the hierarchy to wriggle out of responsibility: In an ad in the Times on Tuesday, Bill Donohue, the Catholic League president, offered this illumination: ‘The Times continues to editorialise about the “paedophilia crisis”, when all ...”

“... may have been a rational response in 1950s North Carolina: Wendell is aware of the prosecution of gay men, of the fact that he and Frank stand to lose a great deal if they are found out. But it’s frustrating that, in the novel, their isolation also has the effect of sealing them off from history. There’s almost no mention of the ferment of the 1970s and ...”

“... he cried. “You’ve got this one!” ’ Bowie did not want to pose as a respectable gay: under the new legislation it would be better to pose as a shocking and daring gay. He was not conspicuously gay in his adolescence. The Gillmans quote a smart girl called Dana ...”

“... opposed moves to liberalise the divorce laws, and in 1994 declared on television that lesbians and gay men should be ‘locked up in a ghetto’ – homosexuality was ‘a deviation of human nature, like bestiality’. Burns writes that ‘there is no record of Bergoglio having said a word against him. As his auxiliary bishop, Bergoglio professed total loyalty ...”

“... Marchmont playroom, the Humphrey Lyttelton 78’s began to turn, and Rory began to sing: his own gay songs, Border Ballads, the Blues – learnt from Leadbelly and Louis Armstrong. He was educated at Eton, became a National Service officer with the Cameron Highlanders, and went on to read English at Cambridge. It is possible to imagine the eyes of the ...”

“... to write a brief memoir about my relation to Valentino or to his legacy, I might entitle it ‘In Search of Valentino’s Slightly Cauliflowered Left Ear’. Ear, queer: the proof of Valentino’s heterosexuality that Leider amasses in her elegantly worded, richly detailed chronicle does not persuade me, and so I fabricate an underground, chimerical story of ...”