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Having it both Ways

Adam Phillips, 5 November 1992

Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety 
by Marjorie Garber.
Routledge, 443 pp., £25, May 1992, 0 415 90072 7
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... each other for certain things but not for others, promotes the misleading idea that we are all in search of completion. Bewitched by the notion of being complete, we become obsessed by notions of sameness and difference, by thoughts of what to include and what to reject in order to keep ourselves whole. But maintaining this icon of ourselves confronts us with ...

Modern Couples

Chloë Daniel: ‘Love at Last Sight’, 21 May 2020

Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy and Risk in Turn of the Century Berlin 
by Tyler Carrington.
Oxford, 248 pp., £22.99, February 2019, 978 0 19 091776 0
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... of the century new sorts of balls – working-class balls, widows’ balls, balls for the deaf, gay and lesbian balls – took place in the dance halls opening up across Berlin. (Clärchens Ballhaus, which features in Alfred Döblin’s Alexanderplatz, closed earlier this year, ostensibly for renovation.) Dance partners were for the evening, not for ...

Diary

Will Self: On the Common, 25 February 2010

... ash on the south side of the common. The area round here is a notorious cruising ground for men in search of casual homosexual encounters, and often when I walk through it in the mornings I will spot a used condom, as if it were some strange kind of latex airborne slug that, having leaped for the skies, has ended up dangling from the brambles. I don’t wish ...

Break your bleedin’ heart

Michael Wood: Proust’s Otherness, 4 January 2024

Swann’s Way 
by Marcel Proust, translated by James Grieve.
NYRB, 450 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 68137 629 5
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The Swann Way 
by Marcel Proust, translated by Brian Nelson.
Oxford, 430 pp., £9.99, September, 978 0 19 887152 1
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... 1987-89. At this point the old title, Remembrance of Things Past, was dropped, and the plainer In Search of Lost Time taken on.There is more. In 2013, the first volume of William C. Carter’s ‘revised, annotated’ version of Scott Moncrieff’s work appeared from Yale. Four other volumes of the set are now also available, with one still to come. Carter ...

Fraynwaves

Hugh Barnes, 2 May 1985

Towards the End of the Morning 
by Michael Frayn.
Harvill, 255 pp., £9.95, April 1985, 0 00 221822 4
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Sweet Dreams 
by Michael Frayn.
Harvill, 223 pp., £9.95, April 1985, 0 00 221884 4
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The Fall of Kelvin Walker 
by Alasdair Gray.
Canongate, 144 pp., £7.95, March 1985, 9780862410728
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Lean Tales 
by James Kelman, Agnes Owens and Alasdair Gray.
Cape, 286 pp., £8.95, May 1985, 0 224 02262 8
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Stones for Ibarra 
by Harriet Doerr.
Deutsch, 214 pp., £8.95, April 1985, 9780233977522
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Family Dancing 
by David Leavitt.
Viking, 206 pp., £8.95, March 1985, 0 670 80263 8
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The Whitbread Stories: One 
by Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson.
Hamish Hamilton, 184 pp., £4.95, April 1985, 0 241 11544 2
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... and sweaters and process a lot of cheese.’ In the first chapter Kelvin arrives in London in search of power and £5,000 a year, intent on acquiring both in the manner of confidence tricks. The Fall of Kelvin Walker skirmishes around Gray’s favourite themes – politics, sexual politics and religion – without engaging any of them for very ...

Homobesottedness

Peter Green: Love in Ancient Greece, 8 May 2008

The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece 
by James Davidson.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 297 81997 4
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... sons crying out to his boyfriend as he is dying was ‘enough to earn it the nickname “the gay play” in antiquity, which shows how straight most tragedies were’. Just so. The theatre in Athens, even more than the Assembly or the law courts, was the place where the problems of the day or age were explored, where efforts to shape opinion were ...

‘Come, my friend,’ said Smirnoff

Joanna Kavenna: The radical twenties, 1 April 1999

The Radical Twenties: Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture 
by John Lucas.
Five Leaves, 263 pp., £11.99, January 1997, 0 907123 17 1
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... Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not of despair, but of resistance, even vision’. The patricidal disaffection of Berjeman, Waugh and the Sitwells, defined in Lucas’s account as Bright Young Things, was, in contrast, little more than depressive ...

Charging Downhill

Frank Kermode: Michael Holroyd, 28 October 1999

Basil Street Blues: A Family Story 
by Michael Holroyd.
Little, Brown, 306 pp., £17.50, September 1999, 0 316 64815 9
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... in the present by describing the trouble of searching for them in the National State Public Search Room, with its uncomfortable crowds of genealogy freaks. He pretends to be amazed that women habitually give false dates and men false descriptions of their status in passports. Considering the extreme oddity and irresponsibility of his parents, which here ...

Lost Empire

D.J. Enright, 16 October 1980

Earthly Powers 
by Anthony Burgess.
Hutchinson, 650 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 09 143910 8
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... the time: for him, war drives out sex. Burgess is hardly an author whom one would suppose to be in search of new sensations. It could be (I came close to thinking at one stage) that, heterosex being so awful, homosex has to be a little better. But no, Toomey doesn’t ‘glory in it’, he dislikes his fellows in sex (‘hissing, camping, simpering’), and ...

How long?

Hilary Mantel, 27 February 1992

The Literary Companion to Sex: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry 
edited by Fiona Pitt-Kethley.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 415 pp., £18, February 1992, 1 85619 127 3
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The Love Quest: A Sexual Odyssey 
by Anne Cumming.
Peter Owen, 200 pp., £15.50, November 1991, 9780720608359
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... Pitt-Kethley is no doubt aware of this, and one can sympathise with her in her largely futile search for female writers to provide another point of view. The Restoration brings us Aphra Behn’s Betty Flauntit, with the age-old female cry: ‘No matter for his Handsomeness, let me have him that has most money.’ But is anyone enjoying themselves? The age ...

The God Squad

Andrew O’Hagan: Bushland, 23 September 2004

... Schwarzenegger, the California governor who opposes George Bush’s position on abortion and gay marriage and the church, was chosen to give a platform speech opposing anti-war ‘girly-men’ and praising George W. Bush for having a tough and unshakeable position on Homeland Security. Homeland means a lot to Schwarzenegger: he used to be from Graz until ...

The cars of the elect will be driverless

Frank Kermode, 31 October 1996

Omens of the Millennium 
by Harold Bloom.
Fourth Estate, 256 pp., £15.99, October 1996, 1 85702 555 5
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... it is the role of the angel to wander about the stage chatting not very usefully to the sick gay hero, and it seems that the main task of angels nowadays is ‘to reassure Americans’. How have things come to this pass? The American angel is not in its true nature insipid. It has a grand ancestry. The prophet Enoch was taken up by God and made into the ...

Down with Cosmopolitanism

Gillian Darley, 18 May 2000

Stylistic Cold Wars: Betjeman v. Pevsner 
by Timothy Mowl.
Murray, 182 pp., £14.99, March 2000, 9780719559099
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... pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or too aggressive in a country town’) and building types. There were passages from Ruskin, odds and ends in a section called Marginalia and plenty of good humour. Alongside the crisp black and white photographs of pristine new buildings were colour ...

The chair she sat on

J.I.M. Stewart, 19 July 1984

Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1920-1969 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hodder, 336 pp., £14.95, June 1984, 0 340 26241 9
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... and close friend Robert Liddell engaged in a somewhat demeaning rummage in Burke and Crockford in search of distinguished Compton-Burnetts whether living or dead and gone, he was astonished to discover none at all. Both Burnetts and Comptons had in fact been farm labourers not many generations back, and Mrs Spurling thinks that Ivy must have been about thirty ...

Networking

Thomas Healy, 11 February 1993

Living Dangerously: Young Offenders in their Own Words 
by Roger Graef.
HarperCollins, 262 pp., £14.99, January 1993, 0 00 215967 8
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... an alcoholic mother. Chloe, his probation officer, reckons it’s ‘conceivable he just might be gay but doesn’t know it’. This is patronising shit. Chloe’s as bad as Graef in her condescension about what the boys do and do not know – though it is clear they know little of Aids transmission and often scoff at the idea of condom-use. Johnnie is ...

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