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“... was needed by his own party managers more than he needed them. (Not for nothing was he a friend of Tom Driberg, whose own non-political needs also made him the perfect division-of-labour cruising companion.) Vidal has spoken elsewhere of never missing a sexual trick, and of not having to decline in years while brooding over the lost chance of this one and that ...”

“... North or Midlands. Underlying this peculiarity of the English scene is the pattern described by Tom Nairn, fresh from Pisa, writing fifty years ago of the assimilation by the local bourgeoisie of the conservatism of the landowning rulers of the country: The very urban world, the bricks and mortar in which most of the population lives, is the image of this ...”

“... than acting on the stage’ in the description of the political contacts-man and Astor consigliere Tom Jones, using words of the sort that later stuck like labels to Waldorf’s son David wherever he went. Waldorf’s wife, whom he met on an Atlantic crossing, was the opposite. Variously compared to a gnat, a grasshopper and a Chinese cracker, Nancy Langhorne ...”

“... freedom from apartheid is ‘incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’. James Baldwin sought to profane what he termed a ‘pious silence’ around Israel’s behaviour when he claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an ...”

“... for immigrant Europeans – first the Irish and then the Jews – to pass. Rogin quotes James Baldwin: ‘No one was white before he/she came to America.’ It is customary to derive American movies from the low comedy and ethnic knockabout of late 19th-century vaudeville, as well as the mishmash of spectacular attractions that characterised staged ...”

“... world new with carbolic silences, like Ernest Hemingway, or to turn things upside down, like James Baldwin. His political triumphs would be in the manner of his small personal displays – seasonal disturbances on the ground where fashion and writing and crime and movies met and clashed by night. And out of all this he would emerge a celebrity, a world-class ...”

“... the scaffold. Whatever possessed her, when the little queen fell in love with Henry’s favourite Tom Culpepper, to facilitate their meetings? Why did she spy and lie for the queen, help her seek out unlocked doors and backstairs when the court went on progress to the north? ‘Come when my lady Rochford is here,’ Catherine wrote to him, ‘for then I shall ...”

“... too is a struggle to break free of ‘typecasting’ – a refusal to accept the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer ...”

“... of a joke, especially at the hands of sources associated with New York, from Spy’s jibes to Alec Baldwin’s impersonation on Saturday Night Live, his rage is stoked. Portraying himself as the innocent party he lashes out, a narcissistic reflex but also a tactic he learned from Roy Cohn.Resentment born of entitlement, of the feeling that he was being treated ...”

“... Death in Venice to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar to the work of Genet and Isherwood and Baldwin and Burroughs, but as each new novel or play or poem appeared it was treated as a one-off; if the work was a critical success it was despite its homosexual content, if the work failed it was because of it. But by the Seventies gay men in the United States ...”

“... European ladies’ and similar barracuda. He doesn’t divulge any gossip or glean any Tom Wolfe-ish observations from these outings, too concerned with keeping tabs on his own progress to tilt the spotlight elsewhere. One of the best-known passages in Making It is its account of the status update running like a stock ticker through the minds of ...”

“... conversion to Christianity: I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene ...”

“... economic failure and poverty, was laid at its door. In a letter to the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, the Tory MP for Argyllshire, F.A. Macquisten, made unfavourable comparisons with Norway’s coastal services (the same comparison, just as unfavourable, is still being made) and proposed that an efficient railway company took over the fleet. In the ...”