26 Quotes by Philip Hensher

Memory, that exhausted repertory actor, going through the exhausted, familiar lines of some tired melodrama. It moved through the now meaningless scenes with a terrible practised proficiency for her benefit alone; and she was in the wings, condemned to watch it over and over

... something very unusual, a chocolate-flavoured log of goats’ cheese. “Made by lesbians in Wales,” Sam had explained superfluously.

When you think of the Gay Plague, it’s really for the best these days that we put on a cheerful face and get on with what queens do best.

Do you not know? No Sicilian will wear underwear for five months. It is just too hot. Oh, the day in September when you have to put on your underwear!

If you wanted lesbians to come to a discussion, too, it might be better not to call your group the Gay Men’s Group.

Where are the lesbians tonight, then?’ Alan said. ‘Why are we talking about them when they’re not interested enough to come to the discussion?’‘They’re separatismed,’ Duncan said.

When I go to bed with a man,’ he had said once, and Duncan now said for the benefit of the carriage and the complaining woman, ‘I expect him to maintain full erection – full erection – from the moment of nudity onwards. Do I make myself plain? The very first moment of nudity. Anything else – anything that falls short of that – I regard as a personal insult.

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

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.