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“... on the impact of the outside world on their people rather than the other way round. Even Peter Pulzer’s excellent ‘political history of a minority’ does not quite escape from such introversion. The two Jews whose impact on German politics was the greatest, the founders of the German labour movement, Marx and Lassalle, barely appear (there are ...”

“... else. Two authors are credited: ‘by Robert Katz’ is coupled with, in smaller type, ‘and Peter Berling’. The latter is a German film producer, who, says Katz, ‘cannot be called a Fassbinder person’. This formula is used throughout the book (sometimes reduced to FPs) to designate a groupie. Berling, however, is said to possess impressive ...”

“... necessary hypocrisies of the age, whereby Oliver’s sexual adventures are yearningly evoked by a gay author, yet punished as at once the inevitable fruit of disability and the seed of a judicial death. Whether Williams knew it or not, his story proposes homosexuality as a deficiency the body must register, leading to deficient behaviour: ‘Before ...”

“... through so many of her essays. It really was because of sex. Sontag was 16 when she discovered gay San Francisco, the experience that gives this volume of her diary its title. She was born in January 1933, the daughter of Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt of Manhattan, traders of furs in China. Her father died in Tianjin when she was five. The widowed Mildred ...”

“... accent fell flat. A fifth member, Andrew Leaver, directed homophobic slurs at James Sullivan, a gay American student friend in whom Michael had confided his supposed bisexuality – a half-step commonly taken by cautious gay men. Sullivan told Michael about the outbreak of gay-related ...”

“... anthems Hymn to St Cecilia (classy words by Auden, usefully decent treble solo)♪ and Hymn to St Peter (eerie plainsong effect, also with coveted treble solo opportunity).♪ In the cathedral, thrillingly at night, that enormous building dark and mysterious beyond our spotlit oasis, we thrashed our way through an evening performance of Noye’s ...”

“... Worms (1999) looks at the way Freud’s death is narrated in biographies by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay. There are plenty of differences, but both biographers need to see Freud as ‘the master of self-mastery’. Jones in particular, flying in the face of all the psychoanalytic evidence, presents him as ‘a remarkably consistent, heroically unified ...”

“... subtlety that converted me. Boswell, it’s beginning to seem, was on the right track; his overly gay interpretation of same-sex unions is less misleading than the loveless ‘anti-gay’ alternatives offered by his critics. For a very long period, formal amatory unions, conjugal, elective and indissoluble, between two ...”

“... sons crying out to his boyfriend as he is dying was ‘enough to earn it the nickname “the gay play” in antiquity, which shows how straight most tragedies were’. Just so. The theatre in Athens, even more than the Assembly or the law courts, was the place where the problems of the day or age were explored, where efforts to shape opinion were ...”

“... 20th-century cult of childhood is that the illusions he could never escape did not deceive him. Peter Pan’s appeal to the audience to save Tinker Bell’s life is irresistible: ‘Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!’ Brave little Tink is saved every time. Some really did have faith in ...”

“... Paris figures in the titles of both James Campbell’s and Peter Lennon’s books, but this is a restricted, specialised Paris. Campbell takes us into something called the ‘Interzone’ (the term is odd, and troublesome), inhabited by assorted exiles, misfits and drop-outs during the Fifties and late Forties. Lennon’s jaunty impressionistic book takes us into the Sixties, with an account of his experiences as a young journalist writing, sporadically, for the Guardian, while, in the intervals, getting caught up in all kinds of adventures (best of all an improbable encounter, in the company of Samuel Beckett, with Peter O’Toole ...”

“... the burning of homosexuals’ body parts (so they don’t infect potential organ recipients with gay DNA). ‘My approach is somewhat theatrical,’ he told Alexey and other staff on his first day, ‘but I stand by every word.’ RIA began to change. The live streams of trials stopped. Hope for a rebellion against the new masters faded when a poll inside ...”

“... First they had to decide where they were headed. What they wanted … Where are you headed, Peter?’ he suddenly asked. I didn’t know. ‘You’re headed to death. We’re all headed to death. That’s the first thing I would make them realise … That’s the thing about us bikers. We live with death every day. We’re a death cult. We know where ...”

“... volume there is a poem called ‘It’s hard to dislike Ewart’. Too true, as Clive James or Peter Porter might say, possibly with a certain wry exasperation. Generally speaking, our fondness and admiration for poets does go with a potential of patronage or dislike, a pleasure in our sense of the absurdities and vulnerabilities of their worlds – Keats ...”

“... president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported both Peter Hall and Peter Brook at a time when their avant-garde work frequently brought storms of criticism. He had a voracious appetite for both English and French literature and liked to hunt down French novels on the Left ...”