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“... the best young Russian writers – including M.A. Kuzmin, a predatory but thrillingly rebellious gay who roped the young Mirsky and his friends into a homoerotic salon. Politically, Dmitry had no time for the doomed efforts to turn Russia into a constitutional state. As Smith puts it, he ‘never seems to have written or done anything to suggest that he ...”

“... ever more awkward and dangerous situations – preferably involving ‘sinister’ men – in her search for ‘my own little idea of salvation’; Mrs Copperfield, on a trip to Panama that’s in the loosest sense a parody of the Bowles honeymoon, leaves her husband for a local prostitute called Pacifica. Though there’s an apparent parallel between the ...”

“... moments of narrative tension, which then lodge the book’s apparently minor characters – a gay junkie, a celebrity profiler, a flailing PR executive – more securely in the reader’s memory. People who would only be allowed bit roles in a longer, intricately plotted novel kaleidoscopically emerge as figures in their own right. Egan exposes her ...”

“... his third passion, which both continued and contradicted his Modernist and Pop beliefs, was his search for an architecture autre – ‘other’ in the anti-classical, almost ‘raw’ sense of the art autre or art brut advocated by Jean Dubuffet and others in the 1950s. The Brutalism of the Smithsons and Stirling presented such an architecture for ...”

“... as a single woman, published in the St James Chronicle in 1763, was entitled ‘Imagination’s Search after Happiness’. It therefore seemed natural to her to use her talents to charm her distant new husband, ‘so Instead of Dressing showily, or behaving usefully – I sate at home and wrote Verses.’ But Thrale wasn’t impressed and Johnson stepped ...”

“... leaves little doubt that dancing has long been the target of state repression, especially when gay or Black people are doing it. The founding legend of rave concerns the ‘Ibiza Four’: the DJs Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, who in 1987 went on holiday to Ibiza, took Ecstasy under the stars at the open-air club ...”

“... deranger of the senses, or ‘Hallucinogenic Poet’; and, as the lover of Paul Verlaine, the ‘Gay Poet’. Mason means myths, I think, in the sense of true stories which become more than the sum of their parts. The problem with them all, he believes, is that they ‘put too plain a face on the poems’, which are ‘vessels of indeterminacy’ and ...”

“... which the emotion appears to be hidden, to lurk mysteriously in the space between the words. The search for pure accuracy in her poems forced her to watch the world helplessly, as though there were nothing she could do. The statements she made in her poems seem always distilled, put down on the page – despite the simplicity and the tone of casual ...”

“... among the privileged – the CIA under Obama set up a recruiting office at the Miami Beach Gay Pride parade. Overt racism and homophobia had become taboo, even as imprisonment or premature death removed 1.5 million black men from public life. Diversification and multiculturalism among upwardly mobile, college-educated elites went together with mass ...”

“... so coolly or callously, and so at odds with what we know of his own quiet lifestyle that led Peter Gay to describe Burckhardt as an intellectual voluptuary. The founders of the new history may have seen a foreshadowing in Burckhardt, but it was Durkheim they modelled themselves on. The latter’s objective approach, which demanded a hard society of hard social ...”

“... has a compass at all it’s fixed permanently on self-seeking.23 February. I go to the chemist in search of Collis Browne, which Boots choose no longer to sell, though why no one can explain. Depending on what one wants, the chemist has always been a theatre of embarrassment, though never so much as when our local pharmacy was on the corner of Sharpleshall ...”

“... Similarly, no one who once uses the recently-advertised OED in machine-readable form with all its search and cross-reference facilities will want to be confined to the printed volumes. Chadwyck Healey have advertised for imminent sale a database comprising texts of all the poetry listed in the NCBEL. It cannot be long before all literature in English is ...”

“... social occasions. But I do believe, as Simon evidently does too, that diaries, whether grave or gay, are worth keeping for their immediacy as a record. My grandmother kept one before and during the early part of the Second World War, and before I deposited it with Newcastle University I read through it at a stretch. What was extraordinary was that I started ...”

“... agony of Christ on the cross. Nor was it all cycling. I stood, with knots of people, on the Rue Gay-Lussac, and applauded Marcel Cerdan as he was driven past at a royally deliberate pace. I was taken to a chic bar in order to catch a glimpse of the patron, the legendary Georges Carpentier. I saw young boys, in Saint Malo, flinging themselves into Boyhood of ...”

“... yet more marked in The Quattro Cento, an angular scurry round the back corners of Italian art in search of a counter-Florentine account of the 15th century, its fitfully dazzling prose shot with anxious glances over the shoulder at ancestor authorities: a book for which the phrase ‘desperately clever’ could have been coined.) Referring for method to the ...”