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“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... were performing just the same desperate balancing act of titillation-with-respectability in their search for readers and advertisers in 1918 as they are today. ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ was the logo of the New York Times in 1896, and over the decades it applied to British tabloids too. Some of the most appealing material (if not the ...”

“... murder of a head of state (even of a dead former head of state) on a book cover was too shocking. Gay novels are off limits.Then there is the case of Salman Rushdie. The scholar Liu Kaifang translated Midnight’s Children in 2002, but his publisher promptly got cold feet and the book was pulled. In 2015, another house bought the rights and published the ...”

“... life. Wilde took Gide to a café in a remote part of the city, Douglas having gone to Biskra in search of a boy called Ali. As tea was being prepared for them, Gide noticed ‘a marvellous youth’ at the half-opened door. ‘He remained there quite a while, one raised elbow propped up against the door-jamb, outlined against the blackness of the ...”

“... Trump, Donald’s father, was a king of Queens; the Donald became a joker in Manhattan. In search of fame and greater fortune in the big city, he set out from the family mansion with its 23 rooms, nine bathrooms and, at the front, four white columns adorned with a confected family crest. A Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce were parked in the driveway, guarded ...”

“... the only game in town. When, you wonder, will someone new turn up? If it’s true – as a famous gay male writer has suggested – that there are really only 500 people in the world and after a while one has slept with most of them, then the sapphic dating pool has got to be even smaller: eight or ten perhaps, 12 or 15 at most. It’s ...”

“... to a trolley for a lethal injection, he actually assisted the executioners in their hour-long search for a viable vein in which to place the lethal catheter. (He thought they were doctors trying to cure him.)This, coupled with Clinton’s ostentatious membership of an all-white golf-club, strikes me as a more pressing issue of morals and ...”

“... footage shot on the Old Kent Road during the 1970s shows children on the streets, and early in my search, I used to scan the little groups playing by building sites or standing at bus stops, the children under the advertising hoardings or walking past the shops, to see if any of them resembled a blond-haired boy in a photo on a family tree, a boy that a ...”

“... in the field. With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his colleague Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The ...”

“... melodrama and bathos were always close at hand. Born into a family of astonishing dysfunction (a gay father, a brittle and over-protective mother, the deplorable and never-to-be-forgiven birth-name Vivian, alcoholic and suicidal siblings) Chambers could well have become a drifter if he had not signed on at Columbia University and been noticed by Mark Van ...”

“... as an active revolutionary. His politics remained implacably Republican, but he had embarked on a search for intellectual and personal fulfilment, both of which eluded him. Post-revolutionary Ireland was never comfortable with him, nor he with it: a central theme of Richard English’s absorbing study is O’Malley’s ambivalence towards Irish pieties, and ...”

“... come from?’ For a fleeting moment, two years later, as they manned the barricades of the rue Gay-Lussac, daubed their slogans on walls across the Left Bank and engaged the enemy in the Paris streets, the Situationists understandably thought of themselves as the avatars of high postwar revolutionary theory. Since 1968 the literature on the Situationist ...”

“... She stopped what she was doing and looked at him. ‘We need another fridge,’ she said. They search through newspaper advertisements for something they can afford. Sandy sees that they must go to a type of auction sale that her husband feels to be demeaning. She turns away to prepare a meal, and when she looks at him again it is to find that not only the ...”

“... he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the morning. They’re wrong. I nearly died in an ...”

“... in a dramatic week for freedom in America. The Supreme Court had ruled five to four in favour of gay marriage; at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Obama had drawn on the cadences of the Southern black church, in perhaps the most powerful speech of his presidency, and invited his audience to join him in singing ‘Amazing ...”