Homosexuality

If you think you know what to expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, then when it comes to The Sparsholt Affair, you’ll almost certainly be right. Once again, Hollinghurst explores British gay history by plunging us into haute bohemia over several decades of the 20th century. (A few years ago he told an interviewer that the main characters in his next book ‘will all be more or less heterosexual’: a plan that sounded pretty unlikely at the time and, seeing as this is his next book, was evidently abandoned.) Once again, he combines his broad sweep with plenty of equally impressive close-up analysis — and all in prose that manages

The bestselling humourist and New Yorker essayist David Sedaris is renowned for an almost hypnotic deadpan drollery and maybe especially for The Santaland Diaries, his uproarious account of earning part-time cash as a department store Christmas elf. Now he is bringing out an edited version of his personal diaries. It’s the first volume of two, taking us from his days as a broke student, stoner and young gay man in North Carolina and Chicago, through to the years of literary fame and success in New York and Paris as the new century dawns — a distinction worn lightly. Fans, semi-fans and non-fans (I am midway between the first two categories)

Nowadays, most of us living in the liberal West agree that there can never be anything morally wrong with love between consenting adults. This is good for society but bad for novelists. The tale of the grand passion that runs foul of societal mores is a staple of literature. What is Madame Bovary if Emma can slam divorce papers on Charles’s desk after her first few sexts with Rodolphe? Writers who want to do the love versus society theme have to get creative. Ross Raisin has hit on the sterling idea of heading for the world of professional football. Not a single one of Britain’s 5,000 full-time players is openly

On the Whitsun weekend of 1935 an art student called Denton Welch was knocked off his bicycle by a car and suffered catastrophic injuries, including a fractured spine. Although he made a remarkable partial recovery, he subsequently endured regular bouts of disabling illness, and would die in 1948 aged only 33. Welch continued to paint after the accident, but also began writing the autobiographical fiction for which he is now best known, publishing his first novel, Maiden Voyage, in 1943. By this time he was living in a chauffeur’s flat over a garage in rural Kent. When well, he was able to walk and bicycle around the countryside, exploring buildings

‘To get a confession from a proud male factor, it is always better to call for a poet than a priest.’ These are the wise words of William Archer, the narrator of part of The Fatal Tree and the notional editor of the rest. Mind you, he’s biased: he aspires to be a poet, though he is at best a ‘garreteer’, one of the Grub Street hacks who provide better writers than themselves with lurid copy about the early Georgian underworld they live in. Archer’s world is the ‘Hundreds of Drury’, the streets and alleys around Drury Lane where the thieves, prostitutes and con men ply their trades. Known as

This month, 30 years ago, I wrote a draft of what was to become soon afterwards the first comprehensive human rights charter for people with HIV. It was born out of an urgency to stop the global drift by governments to panic and repression. In March 1987, a handful of us founded the UK Aids Vigil Organisation to campaign for the protections set out in the charter, lobby the World Health Ministers Summit in London and host a parallel HIV human rights conference, one of the first such conferences held anywhere. Our modest efforts were a mere footnote to a much bigger and more important story, which is told by

All biography is both an act of homage and a labour of dissection, and all biographers are jealous of their subjects. Most keep it cool, but some like it hot and have created a distinct category in which jealousy becomes murder followed by necromancy: the one they hug is asphyxiated — but lo! — they breathe their own air back into it. Sartre’s book on Jean Genet is such a work, as are Brigid Brophy’s on Ronald Firbank and Roger Lewis’s on Anthony Burgess. Claude Arnaud’s on Jean Cocteau is yet another. Its approach is intensely romantic. Everyone is heaving in lurid colours. Arnaud certainly knows his material; and that