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Somerset Maugham and his Bronzino Boy
Two men played a major role in Somerset Maugham’s life: Gerald Haxton until his death in 1944, and then Alan Searle. In her biography of Somerset Maugham (The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Random House, 2010), whose publication William Boyd … Continue reading
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Alan Turing’s Lost Autofiction: The Short Story Behind His Conviction
In December 1951, Alan Turing had just completed his groundbreaking work on morphogenesis, which would be published the following year. Deciding he deserved a reward, he picked up a young man on the streets of Manchester and brought him home. … Continue reading
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Leonardo’s Early Years: Between Fiction and Biography
Florenzer by Phil Melanson (Liveright, 2025) is a historical novel about the youth of Leonardo da Vinci that explores his awakening to sexuality and his formative artistic years. It ends at the moment when Leonardo leaves Florence in 1482, leaving unfinished Adoration … Continue reading
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Tagged Charles Nicholl, Leonoardo da Vinci, Phil Melanson
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Queerness in Dumas’ Fiction
Reading the latest issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review, I stumbled on an article arguing that The Count of Monte Cristo is threaded through with sapphic text and subtext in regard to the relationship between Eugénie Danglars and her … Continue reading
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Tagged Alexandre Dumas, La Dame de Monsoreau
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
I recently read Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the excellent Norton Critical Edition (2021), edited by Deborah Lutz, after reading the review of the new Stevenson biography (Storyteller, Leo Damrosch, Yale University Press, 2025) in The New … Continue reading
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Stan and Gus, Gilded Age and Secrets in New York City
In New York last weekend to see The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the opera that opened the season at the Met. Despite the lukewarm review from The New York Times. Clay is homosexual, but it’s a secret he doesn’t accept, … Continue reading
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Tagged Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White
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Flaubert and Caillebotte
While reading Michel Winock’s biography of Flaubert (Gallimard, 2013), I came across these reflections: The trip Flaubert undertook in Brittany with his friend Du Camp proves that, when he wanted to free himself from his mother’s control, Gustave did so … Continue reading
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Tagged Gustate Flaubert, Gustave Caillebotte
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From Gregory to Gloria: How DEI Shapes the Remembrance of a Hemingway
A surprising detail appeared in the recent New York Times obituary of Patrick Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s last surviving son, who died at the age of 97. The article referred to his sibling this way: Hemingway’s third child, Gloria Hemingway, was … Continue reading
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A new biography of C. P. Cavafy
Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography (G. Jusdanis and P. Jeffreys, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) has been released recently. Its review in the TLS starts with: Constantine Petrou Cavafy (1863–1933): a poet of obscure history and an eroticism so gentle, … Continue reading
Paul Yonnet on Gide
From Zone de mort, Stock, 2017 (not translated) : This book of correspondence ends with an excerpt from Paul Valéry’s Notebook 24. In it, he noted down a conversation he had just had with André Gide, in 1925. Gide, who was … Continue reading
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