“... preferred her own company, and the company-not-company of books: Maeve Binchy, Catherine Cookson, Oscar Wilde and more daring authors, such as Edna O’Brien, who were on her father’s ‘forbidden list’. She lost her taste for reading as an adult because she ‘couldn’t concentrate on other people’s stories’, but she scrutinises her fellow ...”

“... are not invited isn’t worth living,’ Calasso declares in conscious or unconscious parody of Oscar Wilde on the subject of utopias. But the necessary consequences of inviting the gods were rapes, abductions, sacrifices and the beginning of history. The gods for their part were gratifyingly interested in human beings but could not help regarding them ...”

“... and Milton Kessler (her professor at Harpur College in the Sixties) as intellectual mentors, and Oscar Wilde as her literary idol, her staccato style derives in many respects from American stand-up comedy, the rude and abrasive mode of Lenny Bruce or Don Rickles, which gets a lot of its energy from dealing with hecklers. Paglia frequently cites the ...”

“... was executed as were untold thousands of Irish rebels), and in Autobiographies he remembers how Oscar Wilde once remarked to him: ‘we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.’ In one of his open letters to United Ireland he warns that a nation can become ‘thoroughly stupified by oratory’, and here ...”

“... were echoes, too, of an older Magdalen of the 1920s and before, stretching back to the time when Oscar Wilde was an undergraduate, a world of rowing hearties, intellectual mediocrity and foppish wealth. The most ancient scouts muttered darkly about buckled shoes, Masonic links, a Young Octobrist cell, and the college having once been full of ...”

“... place and profit. This analysis would suggest that the cause failed because its leaders, like Oscar Wilde, could resist anything except temptation. No doubt this line of explanation was valid in some cases: Major General Lambert, for example, is a figure whose ambition cannot easily be denied. Yet the truth in this type of explanation is surely ...”

“... That title’s one which nobody can claim. You have to wait for others to bestow it. Not even Oscar Wilde assumed the name, Who called himself both genius and poet. That he was self-appointed to his fame – A true wit wouldn’t hint it, much less crow it. Poor knackered Nicky thinks he’s Alan Coren: He’s just a wee laird with a twitching ...”

“... is not just in the body. It is in the mind and soul. Call Himmler. Call Dr Ruth and Oprah. Call Oscar Wilde and Descartes. Most importantly, call Freezer World Louise’ (Billy and Girl). Swimming Home is the first novel she has written in 15 years. Levy has combed her early style into spareness, the structure is classical, the unities of time and ...”

“... one of the most mournful chapters in the history of European civilisation. Ninety years ago Oscar Wilde was condemned to walk the treadmill at Pentonville Prison six hours a day for alleged indecency. Less than fifty years ago, after the Nazi seizure of power, homosexuals in Germany were being sent in their thousands to concentration camps, in ...”

“... the grave; And has been a diver in the deep seas, And keeps their fallen day about her . . . Oscar Wilde (‘The Critic as Artist’, 1891) comments perceptively on this seductive Pateresque blarney – ‘the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing’ – but the idea ...”

“... left-wing politics; but Beckman patiently lays this romance to rest as well. Despite tributes from Oscar Wilde and others in the years immediately following Levy’s death, most of her work had long been out of print when Melvyn New edited The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy for the University of Florida Press in 1993. Beckman ...”

“... it, while Lenin spoke in similar terms of the ‘reality of appearances’. It is a phrase which Oscar Wilde, a man who was superficial in the deepest possible way, would surely have endorsed. Freud considered the ego and its impressions a kind of fiction, but one deeply anchored in the reality of the unconscious. For his part, Nietzsche dismissed this ...”

“... on jungle-heat infidelities, his sympathy for sinning soldiers and ‘fallen’ women, and what Oscar Wilde characterised – approvingly, I imagine – as his ‘superb flashes of vulgarity’ were fuel for his political enemies, and a source of unease even for his respectable middle-class allies. Gilmour gives examples: one is his cousin Oliver ...”

“... will not tolerate from a woman’s lips.’But what did they want to say? In conversation with Oscar Wilde, Bradley and Cooper agreed that ‘the whole problem of life turns on pleasure,’ a credo or supposition partly justified by their writings. Their forbiddingly large and varied body of work – the 28 dramas and nine volumes of poetry published ...”

“... But the thinking in the book is almost light. At times, he can make Soares sound like Oscar Wilde (‘I see humanity as merely one of Nature’s latest schools of decorative painting’); at other times, like the J.M. Synge of The Aran Islands, utterly alone in strange weather, trying to make sense of his own solitary condition. Like ...”