Henry James: Portrait Of A Lady

Even though they worked hard at sanitising the letters, the family still worried that too much had been revealed. A year after the edition appeared Alice wrote to her son Harry: “People are putting a vile interpretation on his silly letters to young men. Poor dear Uncle Henry.” Later, Harry regretted giving permission to EF Benson to publish a volume of James’s letters to him. They included passages such as “Why aren’t you here to take a good Devonshire walk with me? I hang over a green garden and a blue sea from a big balcony… There would be room on the balcony even for your inches or cigarettes, even for Apollo’s lips” or “I am divided between 2 sensations – panting for to-morrow pm and blushing for all the hours of the past days.” ...

Colm Tóibín, The Guardian.

Couldn't happen now, of course.*

* Sarcasm.

The Guardian: Irish Gay Marriage Referendum Special Souvenir Supplement

From Germany to Buenos Aires, and with the gay marriage referendum taking place in Ireland tomorrow, here are some stories of couples celebrating same-sex marriage around the world...

Online readers' photogallery.

The Guardian Briefing: Everything You Wanted To Know About Ireland's Gay Marriage Referendum But Couldn't Be Arsed To Ask.

As Ireland’s airwaves imposed a broadcasting embargo on the topic of same sex marriage – and as Ireland’s taoiseach Enda Kenny urged the country to vote yes because “there is nothing to fear for voting for love and equality” – [Colm] Tóibín told Channel 4 News that he was confident of victory. Polls have suggested that 58% of the electorate will vote yes.

“This time round something has lifted, the society has had the imagination to change, and that’s a great thing,” said the author, who is gay himself and who last week said in a lecture that “we are not talking about sexuality. We are talking about our love, the embrace of love, how our love equals that of our fellow citizens”.

“The issue is: what is the difference between my love if you’re gay and your love if you’re not gay that makes my love lesser than yours?” he told Channel 4 News’s Jon Snow on Wednesday. “And if you think my love is lesser than yours, who have you asked and how do you know? The question is really about degrees of love. And if you’re gay, I think you’re pretty sure in the way you’ve lived your life that actually love – for all of us, we’re human – is the same, and we would like that to be publicly recognised and under our constitution.”

With four Irish Catholic bishops asking their parishioners in letters to vote no tomorrow, Tóibín said the church “has no moral authority to speak on civil matters, because of the abuse, and I don’t notice them speaking much on spiritual matters, so that they’re sort of neutered”...

Guardian Books.

Blah blah blah etc etc...