This chapter explores how a set of gay men living in Cambridge developed their art and sexuality together, to explore the connections between a gay life and an artistic life in the twentieth century. It uses archival material to analyse the biographies of John Tressider Sheppard, Dadie Rylands, Roger Fry, Edward Dent and Boris Ord – figures who made significant contributions to theatre, music, literature and art on a national and international scale which were formed by their experiences in Cambridge.

This chapter explores how a set of gay men had instrumental lives as public figures in politics, both narrowly and broadly conceived. Through the archival records of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, C. R. Ashbee, Maynard Keynes, Rupert Brooke, E. M. Forster and their friends, it explores how the tolerant life of a Cambridge college affected the political interventions of these figures.

H Staircase is not a metaphor, nor an allegory, nor a symbol. But place does matter, and does become charged with a heightened significance, layered with memory, a lure for stories. Topography, from atmosphere to institutional form, has proved crucial to the construction of the experience of men who desired men. The college has always been a privileged space. I do not mean simply that it has educated the rich and entitled, though it has certainly done that over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as, correspondingly, it has spent a lot of time and effort from the 1960s onwards trying to broaden access.

An introduction to the history of sexuality; to the history of homosexuality; to the notion of queer; to the Victorian and Edwardian periods; to the relation of the Edwardian and contemporary ideas of sexuality; to the themes of the book.

This chapter explores how homosexuality as a term and as a particuar culture was transformed around the time of its legalisation. Through the records of Michael Jaffé, Noel Annan, Alan Turing, Frank Adcock and contemporary figures, the contemporary experience of gay men in Cambridge is explored against the post-war generation. It articulates how a particular style of college life, a hidden centre to the British Establishment, has largely passed away.

This chapter explores how the category of homosexuality was invented and disseminated and how it became part of the self-representation of a generation of men. It explores the revelation and concealment of male desire through the archival records of J. K. Stephen, A. C. Benson, Oscar Browning, E. F. Benson, M. R. James and their friends. It analyses how a public life interfaced with a sexual identity in changing ways.

This chapter explores three key ways that epic has expressed a sense of temporality. The first is foundational: epic uses genealogy to express the structure of things, through aetiologies and causations and the preserving function of memory. Goldhill shows how this sense of foundational time can be enacted through cosmology, in Hesiod’s Theogony, through social structures, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and on a political plain, as in Vergil’s Aeneid or Lucan’s Pharsalia. The second is narratological and thematic: epics make time a subject of their narrative, through the centralisation of delay within the heroic mission (as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid), and even through making time itself a character, as Nonnus does in his Dionysiaca. The third is poetic: how epic marks its awareness of its place in tradition. As shown most strikingly by works like Quintus’ Posthomerica and Eudocia’s Martyrdom of St Cyprian, epic inhabits its own moment whilst forging connections with previous epics and looking ahead to posterity. Using these three vectors, Goldhill explores the ancient epic tradition on a broad scale in a way that grounds the next two chapters in this section.