The word ‘camp’ is often used as shorthand for ‘homosexual’. Its wider cultural sense has been best defined by Susan Sontag: the sublime treated as ridiculous or the ridiculous treated as sublime. In Sontag’s first category might be Marcel Duchamp’s daubing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. And in the second? Well, suppose somebody wrote a huge, respectful, footnoted book on the St John’s Wood Clique — the group of Victorian artists which included W.

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