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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a puritanical German public that had been scandalised by recent court cases and the fall of Oscar Wilde, and to keep Mann himself safe from suspicion. Homosexual critics have called Mann cowardly not to have shown Aschenbach in a more positive light. Seen in the context of the time, however, Mann had a lot to lose by obviously sympathising, let ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... between Elizabeth Taylors one (actress), two (novelist) and three (friend of Gladys Calthrop). Wilde, Wilder and Wilding mark the beginning of the end; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor make 22 appearances: and in a trickle of Zanucks, Zinkeisens and Zolotows, the torrent ends. It must be one of the most astonishing cast-lists ever appended to a diary. For ...”

“... in the dead of winter; and always champagne’. (He didn’t mention the inadequate heating: Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s niece and one of Barney’s lovers, claimed that if you turned the chairs upside down you’d find oysters sprouting underneath them.) The guests were ‘curious, unexpected people’, though mostly important ...”

“... individual, the event which dominates the story is one of those extraordinary examples of life, as Oscar Wilde said it did, imitating art – in this case, detective fiction. A month after the four men were sentenced, an ambulance liaison officer named Hubert Spencer, an amateur antique collector and dealer, was having dinner with the farmer of Yew Tree ...”

“... of Victoriana. David was drawn to the glass case full of rare books by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. “Oh!” he cried. “You’ve got this one!” ’ Bowie did not want to pose as a respectable gay: under the new legislation it would be better to pose as a shocking and daring gay. He was not conspicuously gay in his adolescence. The ...”