The Spectator letter that marked a turning point in gay history
Signing his real name (a brave decision for a homosexual in 1960), Roger Butler sparked a good deal of discussion on a ‘shunned topic’, which eventually led to a change in the law
The queer traditions of King’s College, Cambridge
Simon Goldhill describes how intimate friendships between students and teachers were actively encouraged, with the college providing a refuge for gay men and helping them define their sexuality
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’
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
The frustrations of a society painter
At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately…
Recherché reading
Most readers have favourite books or authors they feel have been either forgotten or unjustly neglected. R.B. Russell, an assiduous…
A gay time by the sea
In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…
Remember forget-me-nots?
‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amid the vices and follies of the world,’…
The wild, wide fen
‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but…
Decline and fall
Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and…
Unlucky in love
James Courage is one of those fine writers who, though he enjoyed considerable success in his lifetime, has now more…
Writers to the rescue
William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to…
Jolly good company
In the spring of 1945 three men pooled their resources in order to buy Long Crichel House, a former rectory…
Meaningful silences
Shirley Hazzard was in her late twenties when, in 1959, somewhat diffidently, she submitted her first short story to the…
Unsavoury bedfellows
Just after John Pearson finished writing The Profession of Violence, his celebrated biography of the Krays, both his and his…
A grand tour of the globe
When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit…
Flower power
Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait…
Capturing the mood of the English landscape: the genius of John Nash
‘If I wanted to make a foreigner understand the mood of a typical English landscape,’ the art critic Eric Newton…
Was there some Freudian symbolism in Lucian’s botanical paintings?
In early paintings such as ‘Man with a Thistle’ (1946), ‘Still-life with Green Lemon’ (1946) and ‘Self-portrait with Hyacinth Pot’…
Feasts, flowers and plein-air painting at Benton End
Cedric Morris is often referred to as an artist-plantsman, and while as a breeder of plants, most particularly of irises,…
Fluttering to extinction: the tragedy of Britain’s butterflies
In 1979, despite the best efforts of scientists for more than a century, a butterfly called the British Large Blue…
The scourge of Christian missionaries in British-Indian history
Objectivity seems to be difficult for historians writing about Britain’s long and complicated relationship with India, and this makes the…
How pleasant to know Mr Lear
Edward Lear liked to tell the story of how he was once sitting in a railway carriage with two women…
Broken and mad
In the final months of 1914, medical officers on the Western Front began seeing a new kind of casualty. Soldiers…
