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I don’t want your revolution

Marco Roth: Jonathan Lethem, 20 February 2014

Dissident Gardens 
by Jonathan Lethem.
Cape, 366 pp., £18.99, January 2014, 978 0 224 09395 8
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... prison. Dissident Gardens is populated by a gallery of similar outcasts: Cicero Lookins, an obese, gay, black professor of cultural studies at a small liberal arts college in Maine; Sergius Gogan, the orphaned son of Miriam Zimmer Angrush and a failed protest singer, who works as a music teacher at a Quaker boarding school; and Miriam’s cousin Lenny, short ...

A Life without a Jolt

Ferdinand Mount: M.R. James, 26 January 2012

Collected Ghost Stories 
by M.R. James.
Oxford, 468 pp., £14.99, October 2011, 978 0 19 956884 0
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... been to find ‘Lost Hearts’ or ‘The Residence at Whitminster’ included in an anthology of gay ghost stories, but both would certainly deserve their place, especially the latter. How much was James aware of the vibrations? How far did he intend them? ‘Reticence,’ he said, ‘may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view ...

People shouldn’t be fat

Zachary Leader, 3 October 1996

Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu 
by Simon Callow.
Cape, 640 pp., £20, March 1995, 0 224 03852 4
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Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles 
by David Thomson.
Little, Brown, 460 pp., £20, September 1996, 0 316 91437 1
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... To Bill Alland, a longtime Mercury colleague (Thompson in Citizen Kane, the shadowy reporter in search of Rosebud), it explains Welles’s difficulty memorising lines. Never quite knowing his lines prevented Welles from inhabiting a character, or ‘surrendering’ to it. ‘If he ever let himself go in a part he’d lose control,’ Alland ...

Good Things: Pederasty and Jazz and Opium and Research

Lawrence Rainey: Mary Butts, 16 July 1998

Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life 
by Nathalie Blondel.
McPherson, 539 pp., £22.50, February 1998, 0 929701 55 0
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The Taverner Novels: ‘Armed with Madness’, ‘Death of Felicity Taverner’ 
by Mary Butts.
McPherson, 374 pp., £10, March 1998, 0 929701 18 6
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The Classical Novels: ‘The Macedonian’, ‘Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra’ 
by Mary Butts.
McPherson, 384 pp., £10, March 1998, 0 929701 42 9
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‘Ashe of Rings’ and Other Writings 
by Mary Butts.
McPherson, 374 pp., £18.50, March 1998, 0 929701 53 4
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... who had ever tempted him from his love of music. But that overlooks the fact that Thomson was gay, something he carefully, almost pathologically, sought to conceal all his life. Anthony Tommasini, in his recent biography of the composer, has dismissed the entire affair as a fabrication on Thomson’s part, and Blondel may be too ready to accept the story ...

You’re only interested in Hitler, not me

Susan Pedersen: Shirley Williams, 19 December 2013

Shirley Williams: The Biography 
by Mark Peel.
Biteback, 461 pp., £25, September 2013, 978 1 84954 604 1
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... opposed the landmark bills legalising abortion and making divorce easier; she doesn’t support gay marriage or the right of gay couples to adopt. At the same time, she has been a vocal defender of social welfare programmes, criticising today’s politicians and her church for paying more attention to policing individual ...

Clothes were everything to me

Lisa Cohen: Bill Cunningham, 25 October 2018

Fashion Climbing: A New York Life 
by Bill Cunningham.
Chatto, 256 pp., £16.99, October 2018, 978 1 78474 281 2
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... history was profound, and he knew it. He had an almost photographic memory and was perpetually in search of styles to delight his eye. He was celebrated, too, for his sweetness and rigour, unpretentiousness and uncorruptible professional ethics – none of these common currency in his milieu. When he writes in Fashion Climbing that the ‘principal ...

Gotcha, Pat!

Terry Castle: Highsmith in My Head, 4 March 2021

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith 
by Richard Bradford.
Bloomsbury, 258 pp., £20, January 2021, 978 1 4482 1790 8
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... doodads hanging off every belt-loop – made his athletic descent from the House galleries in search of the satanic Pence and Pelosi accompanied by his squat, shouting, red-white-and-blue-bandanna-wearing mother. Give ’em hell, Mommy! We’ll hog-tie and hang ’em!And finally – we shouldn’t go there but we can’t help it – the guy in Viking ...

Diary

Elaine Showalter: At the Modern Language Association , 9 February 1995

... network with prospective employers, and offer moral support. The buzz in the halls was that search committees were gentler and kinder this time – there were fewer trick questions or harsh interrogations. Kind or cruel, there are not enough jobs to go around, and everyone thinks there never will be, as predictions of a wave of faculty retirements in ...
After Hannibal 
by Barry Unsworth.
Hamish Hamilton, 242 pp., £16, September 1996, 0 241 13342 4
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... to another neighbour, Arturo, who retired to the country with his lover Fabio, and set up a gay marriage of the most correct, not to say prissy kind – and has been even more coolly and spectacularly cheated. He had put the house, on which they’d lavished so much care, in Fabio’s name to avoid tax – Fabio’s bright idea – and now the traitor ...

Wives, Queens, Distant Princesses

John Bayley, 23 October 1986

The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
by Molly Lefebure.
Gollancz, 287 pp., £15.95, July 1986, 0 575 03871 3
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Jane Welsh Carlyle 
by Virginia Surtees.
Michael Russell, 294 pp., £12.95, September 1986, 0 85955 134 2
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... had a steady job in his father’s business, distrusted the Wordsworths. True, Tom had a bit of a gay crush on Sam and wanted to keep him to himself, but he was a real family friend, always ready with the odd spot of cash, kindness itself to Sara, who was very fond of him and whom he admired in a tactfully chivalrous sort of way. But the real bitch was the ...

Diary

Stephen Spender: Unnecessary Wars, 9 April 1992

... who showed him the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science. Auden also discovered the gay bars of Berlin. Through Layard he became acquainted with the revolutionary teachings of the American psychologist Homer Lane. Auden invited his friend Isherwood to join him in Berlin. Thirty-five years later, in his autobiography Christopher and his ...

Strangeways Here We Come

Dave Haslam: Ecstasy, 23 January 2003

The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E 
by Decca Aitkenhead.
Fourth Estate, 206 pp., £12.99, January 2002, 1 84115 337 0
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... a series of techno compilation CDs. The first sold over 150,000 copies.Ecstasy was common in gay clubs in New York in the 1980s but its use didn’t become widespread until the mid-1990s: the amount seized by law enforcement agencies increased a hundredfold between 1993 and 1999. In America, recent Ecstasy evangelists have included hip hop stars such as ...

Shaved, Rouged and Chignoned

Terry Eagleton: Fanny and Stella, 7 March 2013

Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England 
by Neil McKenna.
Faber, 396 pp., £16.99, February 2013, 978 0 571 23190 4
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... of stays.’ It was a question of gender roles, not anatomical ambiguity. Despite the perils of gay encounters, London was packed with male brothels. On one estimate, two thousand out of a total of five thousand knocking shops catered specially for men in search of boys. There were even bordellos specialising in ...

Hellmouth

Michael André Bernstein: Norman Rush, 22 January 2004

Mortals 
by Norman Rush.
Cape, 715 pp., £18.99, July 2003, 0 224 03709 9
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... in nutritional anthropology. It takes the cherished theme of a brilliant and independent woman’s search for a male partner worthy of her, and transplants it to a utopian matriarchal community in Botswana. For a man to recast Pride and Prejudice as a modern, feminist love affair, and then to set it in Africa, is a bold move, and neither the book’s reworking ...

Sun and Strawberries

Mary Beard: Gwen Raverat, 19 September 2002

Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections 
by Frances Spalding.
Harvill, 438 pp., £30, June 2001, 1 86046 746 6
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... altogether delightful book … an enchanting cast of characters, all set forth with a kind of gay, insouciant wit … the humour is infectious, the figures endearingly ridiculous and admirable human beings.’ ‘A happy book that will give pleasure to thousands,’ chimed in Mervyn Horder in the Spectator, with a prediction that was, if anything, too ...

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