[The] world into which Miss Renault guides us [in "The Charioteer"] is as alien and as insular as any evocation of ancient or archaic Greece.
It is the shadowy world of the homosexual, at once familiar and strange, like a hall of mirrors in which the reflections are subtly distorted. Beyond the flashlight of Miss Renault's attention we are aware of much unseen, much unspoken. It is a world of heightened sensibility and rare delicacy, so much so that heterosexual intrusions invariably strike a vulgar note, like an American entering a Japanese garden….
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