“... land, The leaf that hurts the hand.to the anapaestic anarchy of his running commentary on the 1895 Wilde trial, which opens: ‘Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?/And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?/And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?/Oh they’re taking him to prison for the ...”

“... Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William Phillips, who co-edited Partisan Review with Rahv, described her as ‘one of our most cutting minds’, ‘charming even when most devastating or malicious’. Isaiah Berlin said she was ‘much more bitchy’ than Mary McCarthy, ‘but sharper and more ...”

“... you are happy and well. Write soon and thank you very much for ringing me. All my love. As Oscar Wilde said, please believe me. Yours, George.The relationship gradually deteriorated, partly because Dyer had nothing to do except wait for Bacon to come drinking with him – partly because, Stevens and Swan suggest, he had ‘lost his self-respect when he gave ...”

“... He speaks the exuberant and strangely wooden children’s chorus of the Middle German poet Der Wilde Alexander: ‘Here we ran swilling strawberries/from oak to pine,/through hedges, through turnstiles –/so long as day was burning down’ (‘Children’). He gruffs out a rather Bukowskian Rimbaud: ‘But it was terrific when the house-girl/with her ...”

“... The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of ...”

“... Russian film star Alla Nazimova (a teetering Salomé in the ultra-campy cinematic 1923 version of Wilde’s play); Isadora Duncan, the bisexual modern dancer; the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her Broadway-producer lover Bessie Marbury; the actresses Eva Le Gallienne, Katharine Cornell, Ona Munson, Teddie Gerard, Tallulah Bankhead and Hope ...”

“... and the niece of the celebrated Belle Epoque writer Marcel Schwob, dissipated friend to Valéry, Wilde and Colette. (Ah, the digressive pleasures of Wikipedia: Marcel’s death in 1905, according to H. Montgomery Hyde in The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name, resulted from ‘a syphilitic tumour in the rectum, resulting from his relations with a ...”