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“... lives? What can they tell their children? The answer, according to the interviews carried out by Peter Sichrovsky, would appear to be nothing. Again and again, the respondents in Strangers in their Own Land describe the impossibility of talking to their parents; in some cases they know nothing at all of their parents’ lives before 1945. These are the ...”

“... self-destructive, stripped of family, a figure who slides towards pathos and even absurdity (Peter Sellers as moustache-twitching Gallic ingénu). At the beginning of the trail, the central event has already happened; the detective, divested of any power to abort or determine, can only reconstruct, seeking an origin, an ‘answer’. The genre is ...”

“... forty-year-old often skint but always cadging mother, Helen. Other characters were added later. Peter, the louche businessman with a ‘wallet full of reasons’ to lure Helen offstage and into a brief marriage for the play’s middle sections. Jimmie, the charming ‘coloured naval rating’ who keeps Jo company over Christmas and leaves her pregnant. And ...”

“... Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As Peter Jacobs writes, it supplied a model of ‘a pagan liberty and a savage beauty, combined with a stylised severity or formal purity’, a liberty and a beauty embodied, one might add, in Nijinsky’s legs, to gaze on which Keynes briefly abandoned his Treatise ...”

“... eggs, others preferred to call them poached. Either way, any attempt to describe the appearance of Peter Lorre must deal with those eyes. What teeth are to Julia Roberts and lips to Angelina Jolie, his bulging eyes were to Peter Lorre, his unavoidable calling card and a feature quite out of proportion with the norm. He ...”

“... Kubrick’s Lolita, handsomely set up by the director and beautifully spun out by the actor. Peter Sellers, as the creepy and protean Clare Quilty, has struck up a conversation with James Mason, as Humbert Humbert. The latter is in no mood for any kind of conversation, since he is just marking time before he returns to his hotel room to have sex, as he ...”

“... as ‘frequent sodomy with his own wife’. Despite the risk of being burned alive, however, the gay subculture, centred on barbers’ shops, was, we learn, ‘more public and perhaps more widespread’ in 15th-century Venice than ever before. Ruggiero seems to know the Venetian judicial records well and he asks some searching questions. He pays attention to ...”

“... unpredictable: very smart, a very good speaker and debater, and stylishly and quite flamboyantly gay. He lived in Rotterdam, in the so-called Palazzo di Pietro (it is now possible to enjoy a virtual tour of the house at www.palazzodipietro.nl), and campaigned for election in 2002 in his chauffeur-driven Daimler, always accompanied by two King Charles ...”

“... Gielgud, and with many of his friends. As these biographies agree, many theatrical people were gay, from top management down, and their response to the law was not defiance, much less agitation for reform, but reticence. Reticence cannot have been very difficult, their world being so enclosed; danger lay in forbidden excursions from it, and even then, one ...”

“... And he is forever boasting of his polished Euro-know-how, his multilingual communication skills. Peter Shreeve, who preceded David Pleat, was probably the sort of manager he would have wished Terry Venables to be, or to become: It was this reference to the French that was to produce a curious postscript. Peter Shreeve had ...”

“... still sees that era – which began with the 1960 Lady Chatterley acquittal and ended with the Gay News prosecution in 1976 – as England’s dark age. ‘Permissive’ and ‘alternative’ remain the dirtiest words in his lexicon; his black beast is dressed in soiled denim, ornamented with hand-crafted jewellery, has long, unkempt hair, chants ‘we ...”

“... In the National Theatre’s inaugural season in 1963 Michael Redgrave played Claudius to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet. Apart from Olivier, the theatre’s first director, Redgrave, then aged 55, was its greatest star. Known to the public from his many film roles, and having just been named actor of the year by the Evening Standard for his Uncle Vanya at Chichester, which one critic called ‘the highest level of acting the contemporary theatre has to offer’, he was good box-office ...”

“... to visit their son, who has invited them out to meet his new partner. His partner turns out to be gay, and constricted Croydon morality is baffled and obscurely disgusted. But by the end of the book Russ, the spurned honeymoon groom, has been saved from drowning in a surfing accident by Terry and Tony, the gay couple, and ...”

“... which unites them, at least in retrospect, as key figures in British post-war comedy. Both were gay; both were in the closet; and both, therefore, were fully tapped into that vein of sexual subterfuge and masquerade which has always been central to the British sense of humour. Both idolised Sid Field, and learned some of the basic lessons of their craft ...”

“... subject of the Dickens industry’s symbol-hunting. He makes his point with a heavily satirised gay Canadian Cambridge don who researches ‘his’ author, surrounded by congenial works like Dickens: The Baroque Lamp and Dickens and the Twisted Metastasis. So much for the academics. Ackroyd is a versatile writer (though this is his first novel). One of his ...”