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“... each other for certain things but not for others, promotes the misleading idea that we are all in search of completion. Bewitched by the notion of being complete, we become obsessed by notions of sameness and difference, by thoughts of what to include and what to reject in order to keep ourselves whole. But maintaining this icon of ourselves confronts us with ...”

“... of the century new sorts of balls – working-class balls, widows’ balls, balls for the deaf, gay and lesbian balls – took place in the dance halls opening up across Berlin. (Clärchens Ballhaus, which features in Alfred Döblin’s Alexanderplatz, closed earlier this year, ostensibly for renovation.) Dance partners were for the evening, not for ...”

“... ash on the south side of the common. The area round here is a notorious cruising ground for men in search of casual homosexual encounters, and often when I walk through it in the mornings I will spot a used condom, as if it were some strange kind of latex airborne slug that, having leaped for the skies, has ended up dangling from the brambles. I don’t wish ...”

“... 1987-89. At this point the old title, Remembrance of Things Past, was dropped, and the plainer In Search of Lost Time taken on.There is more. In 2013, the first volume of William C. Carter’s ‘revised, annotated’ version of Scott Moncrieff’s work appeared from Yale. Four other volumes of the set are now also available, with one still to come. Carter ...”

“... and sweaters and process a lot of cheese.’ In the first chapter Kelvin arrives in London in search of power and £5,000 a year, intent on acquiring both in the manner of confidence tricks. The Fall of Kelvin Walker skirmishes around Gray’s favourite themes – politics, sexual politics and religion – without engaging any of them for very ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not of despair, but of resistance, even vision’. The patricidal disaffection of Berjeman, Waugh and the Sitwells, defined in Lucas’s account as Bright Young Things, was, in contrast, little more than depressive ...”

“... in the present by describing the trouble of searching for them in the National State Public Search Room, with its uncomfortable crowds of genealogy freaks. He pretends to be amazed that women habitually give false dates and men false descriptions of their status in passports. Considering the extreme oddity and irresponsibility of his parents, which here ...”

“... the time: for him, war drives out sex. Burgess is hardly an author whom one would suppose to be in search of new sensations. It could be (I came close to thinking at one stage) that, heterosex being so awful, homosex has to be a little better. But no, Toomey doesn’t ‘glory in it’, he dislikes his fellows in sex (‘hissing, camping, simpering’), and ...”

“... Pitt-Kethley is no doubt aware of this, and one can sympathise with her in her largely futile search for female writers to provide another point of view. The Restoration brings us Aphra Behn’s Betty Flauntit, with the age-old female cry: ‘No matter for his Handsomeness, let me have him that has most money.’ But is anyone enjoying themselves? The age ...”

“... Schwarzenegger, the California governor who opposes George Bush’s position on abortion and gay marriage and the church, was chosen to give a platform speech opposing anti-war ‘girly-men’ and praising George W. Bush for having a tough and unshakeable position on Homeland Security. Homeland means a lot to Schwarzenegger: he used to be from Graz until ...”

“... it is the role of the angel to wander about the stage chatting not very usefully to the sick gay hero, and it seems that the main task of angels nowadays is ‘to reassure Americans’. How have things come to this pass? The American angel is not in its true nature insipid. It has a grand ancestry. The prophet Enoch was taken up by God and made into the ...”

“... pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or too aggressive in a country town’) and building types. There were passages from Ruskin, odds and ends in a section called Marginalia and plenty of good humour. Alongside the crisp black and white photographs of pristine new buildings were colour ...”

“... and close friend Robert Liddell engaged in a somewhat demeaning rummage in Burke and Crockford in search of distinguished Compton-Burnetts whether living or dead and gone, he was astonished to discover none at all. Both Burnetts and Comptons had in fact been farm labourers not many generations back, and Mrs Spurling thinks that Ivy must have been about thirty ...”

“... an alcoholic mother. Chloe, his probation officer, reckons it’s ‘conceivable he just might be gay but doesn’t know it’. This is patronising shit. Chloe’s as bad as Graef in her condescension about what the boys do and do not know – though it is clear they know little of Aids transmission and often scoff at the idea of condom-use. Johnnie is ...”