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“... familiar ones. Marvell’s Coy Mistress travels down the centuries and sometimes changes sex. As Joe Orton puts it: ‘When you’re dead you’ll regret not having fun with your genital organs.’ And John Whitworth: Enough of solitary vice. Better to carve yourself a slice Of life, for, as the poet said, There’s fuck-all fucking when you’re ...”

“... sinister mother and son, Sylvia and Norman: both of them sound as if they are just off-stage in a Joe Orton play. There follow activities of the sort named in Rose Boyt’s title, and a cycle of birth, marriage and death documented with a curiously impressive and distasteful laconic relish. Possibly Rose Boyt is about to become the George Gissing of our ...”

“... or Caryl Churchill’s plays directed by Max Stafford-Clark, or the plays of Christopher Hampton, Joe Orton, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Athol Fugard or Sam Shepard. The tradition of unmannered acting, devotion to the text, unostentatious direction, simple and expressive design has been maintained. So also, until recently, has the sectarian fervour with ...”

“... and the weekly music press, as well as from more outré authorities on pop music (such as Joe Orton) and a few anti-pop pieces (by Paul Johnson and Richard Hoggart, among others). Liveliest and most useful are the contemporary reports documenting specific occasions: Elvis Presley recording ‘Hound Dog’, Decca turning down the Beatles, the ...”

“... cut-throat games of vocabulary-flashing and cultural reference pinned down by Harold Pinter and Joe Orton as Britain’s post-war national sport. Tynan, a bookish, unathletic boy, made this kind of competition his own. A compulsive player of word-games, he spattered his early writing with challenges to duels of literacy. A flip through his first ...”

“... deracinated Frenchman and a composite English anti-establishment figure, part Artful Dodger, part Joe Orton. At the same time, he is brought utterly to life in a way that fallen angels can never be, because they are finally a little dull. The result is superb, vivid, and possibly true. One gasps at Rimbaud’s militant genius and the purity of his ...”

“... 1970s West Germany – ‘a tabloid figure’, as Penman puts it, an ‘amalgam of Bertolt Brecht, Joe Orton, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Sid Vicious and Orson Welles’. By 1978, when he made his contribution to Germany in Autumn, a portmanteau film about the crisis caused by the Red Army Faction’s final, suicidal actions, he was famous enough to appear simply ...”

“... of Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘to be read behind closed doors’. Though without necessarily taking Orton’s other piece of advice – namely, to ‘have a good shit while reading it’. Osborne, like Orton, had a bleak childhood (or would like us to think so). Both had weak chests and both spent a brief period learning ...”

“... not, I had not even spotted. Some of these considerations I dramatised in the screen adaptation of Joe Orton’s biography, Prick Up Your Ears. (Orton sees a youth coming) Orton: Look at the package on this. He’s lovely. Halliwell: (frantically) Where? Where? ...”

“... on making himself almost literally the father of the nation? Reading this essay I was reminded of Joe Orton’s comments when the Lord Chamberlain blue-pencilled the use of Sir Winston Churchill’s penis in What the Butler Saw, substituting a metonymous cigar. ‘What am I saying?’ Orton protested. ‘That he had a ...”

“... the staff, had managed to smuggle them back onto the shelves. But in 1962 their luck ran out and Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were prosecuted for defacing the property of Islington Borough Council. Was it this case, plentifully written up in the national press, that gave Philip and Monica their wicked idea? Or did he take his cue from the more ...”

“... and innovative as that of any previous period.’ A shared perception of Bellow, Pynchon, Orton, Heaney, Fowles and Vonnegut as men of the moment or at least of the decade gives a common tone to the critiques of Bradbury and his team, and the slim volumes of the ‘Contemporary Writers’ series interact as the chapters of the Pelican Guide fail to ...”

“... way from the days when European and American expats – Jane and Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Joe Orton and others – enjoyed the sexual courtesy of Moroccan lovers while the colonial regime and its successors turned a blind eye.Crucially, in Morocco – though not in Western Sahara – the regime has moved on from its traditional methods. Physical ...”