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“... of word nowadays: we pride ourselves on our superiority to taboos, and the author of the book, Gay Search, certainly wants to expose the reality of sexual abuse. But should we be equally valiant against the taboo which forbids the activity itself? Why not, when we have disposed of so many other dusty old prohibitions? ...”

“... In his preface​ to the new edition of My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket remembers being in the room with George W. Bush when he was told that a second plane had hit the Twin Towers. Bush was reading to a group of schoolchildren in Florida and Plunket, then a journalist on the Sarasota Magazine, was part of the press corps ...”

“... demonstrates that it was not just that these salons met the social needs of aristocrats in search of a place to meet or of local intellectuals thirsty for good talk; nor were they a Jewish conspiracy. The most interesting fact about them, as she justly notes, is that they were a triple anomaly. They were anomalous in a social structure more rigid than ...”

“... words down, re-assembling and re-coupling them: hagography instead of hagiography, crone-ology, re-search, dis-cover, re-call; seeing/naming/acting, re-member/invent, not bewilder but ‘to be wilder’. It would be a mistake to see these strategies as one feminist writer’s mere perversity. They have much in common with the academic style of suture (coupling ...”

“... Professor Peter Gay is an eminent American cultural historian of German origin, an enthusiastic convert to Freudian doctrine, and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytical Association – you can’t, as a warmly sympathetic biographer of Freud, do-better than that. The sheer amount of biographical, historical and psychoanalytical detail that has gone into the making of this Life is, as far as I can see, unparalleled in the literature of its subject; and so are the care and informed intelligence with which this stupendous mass of facts, conjectures and speculations has been sifted, as well as the attractive, good-humoured and unstrenuous way most of it has been presented ...”

“... I translate, hopefully, as ‘San Salvador’. There are several other beaches, of course, but gay people don’t go there much and we have disdained them. The route to Superparadise runs past the runway. A little off the end of it you come to a turning and have to choose between right and left. Left will take you to the straight side of the beach and ...”

“... cent on those making more than a million euros a year – to the now imperilled legalisation of gay marriage, by way of the controversial banning of homework in primary schools, not much has come together under Hollande. Last October he said clearly that French support for the struggle against Islamists in Mali would not go beyond ‘logistical and ...”

“... You know, in my family,’ remarks a gay Irish architect in Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship, ‘my brothers and sisters – even the married ones – still haven’t told my parents that they are heterosexual.’ It is a neat Wildean inversion, one of the few good jokes in this harrowing, deeply unfunny novel, and a flash of wit with wider implications ...”

“... touch with Jack, who has graduated from the desperation of the closet to the glamour of life as a gay high society tag-along. For a time, Will moves in with Jack as each tends to a much younger lover. Their experiment in inter-generational living falters, however, when the Aids epidemic sweeps them both back into stable monogamy. White’s memoir City Boy ...”

“... setting came Dr Abraham Verghese. Abraham Verghese’s story has to do with migration: his own in search of a peaceful settlement and that of his patients with Aids. Verghese’s journey had taken him to Johnson City in East Tennessee, a small town of about 50,000 people, which nestles in the forest highlands of the Chickasaw, Choctaw and Cherokee. Johnson ...”

“... into its own: its complacencies, tyrannies and inhibitions now seem positively seductive. Peter Gay proposes to write a series of six volumes on ‘The Bourgeois Experience’, of which this is the second, and it is clear that he is on the way to sales and success. Shrewdly, the first two volumes deal respectively with sex and love as parts of the bourgeois ...”

“... be entitled to a powerful sexual overtone, even if not the customary one. The reviewers of Peter Gay’s book have been very receptive to the thought that we have got Victorian sexuality wrong: for it is a leading part of the author’s argument that the Victorians were not prevailingly ignorant, inhibited, prudish and hypocritical about sex. But the ...”

“... compare small things with great) hanker after both conventional success and the goodies of Gay Cockayne, which of course is very greedy of them and quite rightly leads to their resounding pratfalls. Now, none of this is dull (though there are some ugly clots of jargon here and there), and on the whole Mr Adams’s survey of homosexual novelists, their ...”

“... in certain parts of large American cities, you encounter a common sight, a group of men, obviously gay, moving in a sort of protective cluster through the crowd. In the middle of the group is one man who is obviously very, very sick. His friends will not let anyone get too close, but not because he presents an immediate danger to the passers-by. It is the man ...”

“... she studied for this book: the Castro Street quarter in San Francisco – centre of its gay community and a beacon for homosexuals everywhere; Liberty Baptist Church, the fundamentalist empire created by Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and America’s best-known ‘televangelist’; Sun City, a retirement community in the Florida ...”