I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There’s some hollowness if they don’t.

Emily and Fanny are doing their best to remain poker-stiff, firmly staring in their upright palanquins. But two hours on an elephant is as much as either of them can stand, and – after four times as long as that – they pine, they simply ache for the opportunity to complain, even more than the chance to rest.

If you don’t say anything it can’t become important, but if you say it everyone’s ever after got to walk round it like a pile of rocks in the living room.

Why do we say ‘the cockles of your heart’?” David said. “Nothing to do with whelks, I suppose.

Blend in!’ Paul said. ‘Blend in!

I’m reading Edmund White. It’s so nice. All about Jack Holmes and his great big penis. It’s like he’s got a little pet in the house that he needs to take for walks sometimes, in the park. I really like it.

Previously, gay life had seemed a merry series of cabinet reshuffles and rearrangements, in which everyone was single for a time, then paired off for a time. If you stood still with a welcoming smile on your face, sooner or later somebody would come over and sit on it.

Gay men needed lightbulbs too.

The last message he’d had from him was on the back of a postcard with a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh on the front, and the farewell message, handwritten in blue biro in Paul’s looping, confident hand, had said, ‘Suck a black man’s cock for me, darling.’ He had been spared blindness, then. The next he had heard was a hoarse-voiced man announcing himself as Paul’s father, and Paul had died in the hospice.

You see, some of us just find our niches somehow.