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“... Daniel Farson was polite, self-deprecating, impressed by modesty and authenticity, grateful for favours, careful to keep track when it was his turn to buy drinks (which he often did). Gilbert and George, by contrast, are utterly stylised: they speak in relays, move like robots and strongly hint that there is no within within. This book, left incomplete at the time of Farson’s death and tidied up by Robert Violette, is touching and illuminating in part because there is such a mismatch between the author and his subjects ...”

“... The perfect immaculate blankness of the space, set around with thirty great thick blank sheets of white stone, recording the triumph of Soviet armies, had its own beauty; the double fold of stone opening, like a vast voluptuous hard velvet curtain, before the theatre of the space, had its own pressing overpowering beauty; and the two kneeling heavily cloaked ...”

“... chaos warbling in its wake, Assuming, like a fourth dimension, splendour That calls the child with white ideas of swans    Nearer to that green lake Where every paradox means wonder. The Mallarméan subject, though more accessible than in ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, is every bit as immobilised; notice in the following lines ...”

“... against all comers; almost the only friend who saluted his action was the discreet 75-year-old Edmund Gosse, who said: ‘No doubt, in fifty years, this particular subject will cease to surprise anyone, and how many people in the past might wish to have lived in 1974.’ Gide’s moral campaigning didn’t end there. In the two books he wrote about his ...”

“... In the Seventies he took almost no interest in gay liberation, which he no doubt perceived as a white, middle-class movement, a matter of French domestic politics, at a time when his sole commitment was to the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. To add the final insult, he insisted in one of his last interviews that Freud was the most important friend to ...”

“... story he’s cooked up to frighten himself. I own a Mapplethorpe photo of a French guy, a young white man, one of Mapplethorpe’s lovers. The picture was taken in the mid-Seventies, and it has the same density, the same specificity as Fou de Vincent. The man is as particularised, adored but not stylised, as Vincent, unlike Mapplethorpe’s totemic blacks ...”

“... just a good time. There was the failure of the scientists, the non-appearance of the antidote. The white-coated priests of the Eighties had failed us. The virus had the boffins beat. So suddenly we weren’t so sure. Suddenly it wasn’t just them any more. We were all at risk. You could get it in hospital from contaminated blood. You could get it if you were ...”

“... Past is quietly deliberate, but of course the characters in Proust died of time, not of Aids. White wants to register the disaster, but refuses to memorialise the dead only as victims. The title of the novel, as we learn on one of the last pages, comes from Haydn: ‘I kept thinking of Haydn’s The Farewell Symphony. In the last movement more and more of ...”

“... not always clear whose lives they are. They can, of course, be claimed – you can call them, as Edmund White does in this autobiography, ‘my lives’ – but there are always counter-claims. What seemed most intimately one’s own can turn out to have been someone else’s all along. Being possessive doesn’t make one self-possessed, and ...”

“... The friend in the title of Edmund White’s new novel is a writer called Will Wright, a straight man with bad skin but a sterling pedigree. What little we learn about Will’s first novel – a metafictional romance about a man, the heiress he loves and an anthropomorphic cat – comes from Jack Holmes, a handsome, closeted editorial assistant who works with him at a literary quarterly in Manhattan ...”

“... Edmund White has always struggled between appeasing the gods of his art and paying off the princelings of politics. Endearingly, and sometimes infuriatingly, he insists on doing both, and the result often leaves his pockets rather empty. Thus in his book of selected journalism, The Burning Library, he can move from a sublime celebration of Nabokov’s ‘greatness’ to a demand that ‘even the hierarchy inherent in the concept of a canon must be jettisoned ...”

“... radiant with its success there; its cover photograph shows a glamorous lad in a sports vest. Edmund White, once of Time magazine, co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex and only author of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), has written a first-person narrative of the childhood and adolescence of a male homosexual in Middle America. At the end ...”

“... If this were to be the last of the funhouse novels I doubt if anyone would complain very much. Edmund White, Garrison Keillor and Bobbie Ann Mason belong to the generation of American writers born during the Second World War. White’s Caracole is set in an imaginary country, part European and part Third World, in ...”

“... never is, the thief would be a role, a figure in an elaborate social masque, an example of what Edmund White nicely calls ‘the theatricality of everyday life’. Much of what we are is performance, on or off stage. Genet enhances, stylizes this idea; insists on its ritual rather than its fictional aspects, so that social life begins to look not only ...”

“... a prescription for public policy, made on the understanding that something could be done. Men in white coats should be given the funds to get back to their laboratories and defeat Aids. And ‘ought’ in the sense that we had a particular duty to a persecuted group. As well as the practical, good-housekeeping kind of ‘ought’ there was an ...”