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“... My ghostly Mother, I me confess I’ve been indecent, more or less. Lapses of courage are always indecent. You had a greyer time, in which was lent The social way to lie. It was not meant That you should say exactly what you miss. It seems to me that I was always bent Doing the things were safely social, meant To block the questions are without redress ...”

“... Lawrence felt that Hardy’s Sue Bridehead was ‘no woman’ because ‘that which was female in her she wanted to consume within the male force … in the fire of understanding, of giving utterance. Whereas an ordinary woman knows that she contains all understanding, that she is the unutterable which man must forever continue to try to utter.’ No woman would assent to that last sentence unless she wanted to end up a white goddess, or an ordinary white elephant ...”

“... poet, literary critic, and academic critic (three classes now notoriously indistinguishable)’. Gay Clifford was an academic, and by all accounts a brilliant and effective one, a lecturer in English at Warwick, where she was a colleague of Germaine Greer, and the author of a subtle and distinguished book of criticism called Transformations of ...”

“... the most recent in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James (1980) and in Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001). No lack of attention, then, but Richardson’s book is very welcome, in part ...”

“... that an admiring mob snatched his body from the anatomists. He died in 1739, a decade after John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera had audaciously set up the highwayman as a figure of romance. In his original version Gay had destined his dashing and wildly promiscuous Captain Macheath for the gallows, but when informed that ...”

“... women merely decoys, and would involve seeing Stephen as one of those loud, smelly, overeducated gay boys with bad teeth who were once plentiful in Dublin. I became interested in a gloss on page 1230 which states that ‘Michael Begnal suggests, perhaps not entirely seriously, that she [Martha Clifford, from whom Bloom ...”

“... including the Iliad and the Odyssey. Addison complete. Steele complete. Swift complete. Prior, Gay and Arbuthnot. Thomson’s Seasons. For theology he went to Hooker, Tillotson, William Law and Robert South. For technical and ‘philosophic’ (i.e. scientific) expressions he went to John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, Grew’s Cosmologia ...”

“... but as an exile that was also a passport to freedom. The 1980s were not a wonderful time to be gay in Britain: the year of the novel’s publication was also the year Clause 28 of the Local Government Bill became Section 28 of the Local Government Act, and the year the first residential centre for people living with Aids and HIV was opened. The ...”

“... necessary hypocrisies of the age, whereby Oliver’s sexual adventures are yearningly evoked by a gay author, yet punished as at once the inevitable fruit of disability and the seed of a judicial death. Whether Williams knew it or not, his story proposes homosexuality as a deficiency the body must register, leading to deficient behaviour: ‘Before ...”

“... Hester’s literary-critical afterlife, a series of affectionate or antagonistic dismissals. James Clifford began his fine 1942 biography with the observation that ‘today, even in the perspective of over a century, she still arouses ardent admiration or intense dislike.’ His fellow Johnsonians Sir Walter Raleigh and A.E. Newton were also admirers ...”

“... with Cairo buggery – O good Lord!’ As he saw it, Lawrence of Arabia had posthumously become a gay icon. In a later book, Frauds (1957), he dealt mercilessly with such miscellaneous charlatans as Lambert Simnel, George Psalmanazar, the 18th-century literary impostor, and Maundy Gregory, the honours-salesman and broker for the Zinoviev Letter. In the ...”

“... Gascon spirit very strong in him, has a most musical, plaintively-singing, and yet essentially gay and jaunty treble voice; talks unweariedly, and in a very neat and clear and carelessly frank and ingenious way ... close-cropped, bullet-head, of fair weight, almost quite white; laughing little hazel eyes, jolly hooked nose and most definite ...”

“... Ten billion shit-covered insects swarm the vehicle. He has found what he was looking for. It is Clifford Brown and Max Roach. It is 1954 in Los Angeles. With Harold Land on tenor and Bud’s younger brother Richie Powell playing piano, George Morrow on bass, they are playing ‘Daahoud’, and playing it as well as it can possibly be played. The Maestro ...”

“... Sunday Express and even when the law was finally enacted in 1967, the papers continued to describe gay men as predators of the young, until they came up with the separate and more reliable monster of the paedophile, a universal hate figure for our time, and one that no legislation is going to mess up. Until the mining of royal and celebrity seams was cranked ...”

“... hero of the same novel? What of Frieda’s remark that Lawrence identified with both Mellors and Clifford in Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Even with the life alone, the massive accumulation of evidence, together with Lawrence’s complex and unstable emotional history, makes it progressively harder for a modern biographer to make concise judgments. Early ...”