Homosexuality
The clue to Shakespeare’s sexuality lies in the sonnets
They are quite unlike any other sonnet sequence of the time and seem to be a kind of personal statement – written by a man with undeniable feelings for another man
The heyday of the gay guardsmen
In 1943 the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor placed an advertisement in Exchange & Mart offering a pair of trooper’s breeches…
More Mr Pooter than Joe Orton: George Lucas’s gay life in London
Beginning in 1948, Lucas kept a diary chronicling 60 highly promiscuous years – though ‘my great desideratum has always been sympathy and affection’
Sir Roger Casement never deserved to hang
Executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, he was absent from Dublin at the time of the doomed insurrection – and actually tried to prevent it
Victims of a cruel prejudice: the last two men to be executed for sodomy in England
Chris Bryant describes in painful detail how James Pratt and John Smith, working-class men from the Midlands, fell foul of the ‘bloodthirsty English justice system’ in 1835
The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends
In his latest volume of biography, Clinton Heylin spares us no details about Dylan’s misogyny and cranky obsessions during his almighty midlife crisis
Gentle genius
Dissatisfied with his unfinished epic, the dying Vergil called for his scrolls to be burned, but was fortunately overruled by the Emperor Augustus
Germ of an idea
Bleach and germs are the central themes of Dr Semmelweis, written by Mark Rylance and Stephen Brown. The opening scene,…
Queer spaces
Diarmuid Hester goes in search of the private places of eight remarkable figures from the 20th century, to find only Derek Jarman’s cottage preserved intact as a shrine
Cheerful meanderings
Now established in Cambridge, John Cromer embarks on a whirlwind of small adventures, testing our patience, if not our sympathy, with his extensive digressions
A dangerous Christ-complex
His fateful intransigence over the negotiations has been variously ascribed to a Christ-complex, an unhappy childhood and even latent homosexuality
Last chance saloon
Florian Illies describes the charged atmosphere of Europe in the early 1930s, as people grew increasingly desperate to celebrate their last chance of freedom
An eye for the absurd
Come for the satire, stay for the one-liners, and take succour from the hope Walter finds in a world where everyone needs an angel from time to time
Journey to selfhood
Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…
Read his lips
Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his…
Glaswegian waif
Douglas Stuart has a rare gift. The Scottish writer, whose debut novel Shuggie Bain deservedly won the 2020 Booker Prize,…
The making of a poet
Charles Causley was a poet’s poet. Both Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin considered him the finest candidate for the laureateship,…
Decline and fall
Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and…
Have we reached peak human rights?
After the Colston debacle, you might be forgiven for having missed the other legal story that broke this week. The…
Girls, girls, girls
Lolita, the Lady Chatterley trial, the pill, Christine Keeler, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, love-ins, Oh! Calcutta!, the Oz trial…
This will hurt
Before the National Theatre produced Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood they had to make a decision. How could they stuff…
The time of our lives
Gay bar, how I miss you. Barely any lesbian joints have survived the online dating scene, and Grindr has replaced…
Cold and inhospitable
Like this author, I was happily snowbound at a beloved grandparent’s house during the big freeze that began on Boxing…
Diary
Among the greatest bores right now are those friends who insist on telling you, usually as if it’s some kind…
The age of camp is over
Last week we broadcast my BBC radio Great Lives episode on Kenneth Williams. The effervescent comedian and presenter Tom Allen…
