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“... close to the wind in this passage, and indeed in Edward II as a whole. Even allowing, as Alan Bray scrupulously does in Homosexuality in Renaissance England, for an element of exaggeration and possible misrepresentation in the famous ‘Baines note’, in which the dramatist is reported as saying that Christ enjoyed carnal relations with ...”

“... title, its brass-rubbings and its frequent dippings into the nitty-gritty of Christian rites, Alan Bray’s last book, The Friend, might not seem terribly exciting at first glance. And yet it is written in part as a defence of John Boswell’s Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which came out a decade ago, and in part as ...”

“... elucidated in some excellent recent work by critics and historians of sexuality, in particular Alan Bray and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Boswell had little time for such sophistication, but it seems highly relevant to any understanding of adelphopoiesis. The most striking feature of ‘made brothers’ is not their assimilation to the married couple, but ...”

“... may be, At Swim, Two Boys is arguably the most important work of gay male historical fiction since Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. Much of the best gay male writing in English during the past fifteen years, on both sides of the Atlantic, has been preoccupied with historical themes. O’Neill’s novel deserves to be read alongside ...”

“... of austere nutrition advice there was Julia Child, swirling her pan of butter. The historian Alan Bray once argued that the premodern past was distinctive for its blurring of satisfactions, the insistence that it all feels good: sex, eating, getting drunk, dressing up, dancing, fighting, going to bed. The metaphors might stack one on top of another ...”

“... take comfort from the fact that the selection of poems in Essential Reading (1986) is edited by Alan Jenkins of the TLS. And that book contains a few examples of what are (in part at least) knowing winks: after describing a catalogue of sufferings in C, Reading concludes that ‘this, rendered in catalectic tetrameters, might do for the TLS or other ...”

“... is remarkably similar to the relationship between his courtiers and James I, recently analysed by Alan Bray and Michel Rey in an article on ‘The Body of the Friend’, except that in the case of Macedonia the ‘gift of the body’ did not preclude the gift of sex. Holding a near monopoly on intimate relations with the royal personage, they had a near ...”

“... for the Third Programme. McWhinnie agreed and passed the material on to Barbara Bray, the producer of All That Fall, who got to work on the translation I’ve just quoted. Beckett was still commending Le Square the following spring as he finished Krapp’s Last Tape, of which he wrote years later: ‘A woman’s tone goes through the entire ...”

“... these peasants any different from the English peasantry of this age whose individualism has made Alan Macfarlane question the genuineness of their peasant status in his recent Origins of English Individualism? What is the relationship between the incipient Protestantism of many of the opinions here recorded – the scorn for the Catholic priesthood and for ...”

“... of financial deregulation and credit expansion, even its architects now more or less admit – see Alan Greenspan. Intertwined across the Atlantic, European banks and real estate operations were as deeply involved in the debacle as their American counterparts. In the EU, however, this general crisis was overdetermined by another peculiar to the Union, the ...”