Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.

Death is almost never timely, even for the old.

A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.

We’re happier when the assholes are villains.

History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.

Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.

Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.

Art is long and life is short.