“... its artfully innocent hero and world-weary narrator, would seem like the apotheosis of satire. Oscar Wilde would be another exemplar, as a person who decided to live a life which did not simply satirise but self-destructively defied the sexual proprieties of late Victorian society. If a historian of satire saw it chiefly as a vehicle for allowing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the period through Balzac’s microscope and sit up again with both eyeballs the same size. Like Oscar Wilde, Bloch experiences one of those magical moments when fiction exerts a retroactive influence on history. Balzac’s bankrupt perfumer, César Birotteau, succeeds in passing himself off as a real person – one of the self-made men, according to ...”

“... Sutcliffe and Blanford, one of them supposedly the other’s creation, and both a curious blend of Oscar Wilde, Peter Pan and l’homme moyen sensuel. The mist of uncertain identity which shrouds Sutcliffe and Blanford radiates out to the other members of the charmed circle. Monsieur, like Justine at the commencement of the ‘Alexandria Quartet’, must ...”

“... Her life, to outward appearance, goes on much as before. People don’t do things like that? Oscar Wilde, for one, thought that they did: Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die. Ellen, the tale of someone who did it ‘with a sword’ and got away with it, is a ...”

“... are heightened, undifferentiated and much less interesting – a scream, in fact. Orton criticised Oscar Wilde for putting his genius into his life instead of his art, but has copied him in this, as in so much else. The plays are a glittering shambles – no longer absurdist, just absurd. Their aerosol polish no longer dazzles and their subject-matter has ...”

“... ought to feel ashamed of not having done the same. But I do not feel so in this case. We know that Oscar Wilde is much revered on the mainland, and it looks as if Kermode has merely been getting the aesthetic Nineties echoed back at him. No doubt Imagism comes in too. He looks at a landscape with half-closed eyes through a mist, or in a Claude-glass, or ...”

“... Sally reminding her that bright Jewish women should marry smart businessmen. The trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 was a warning of the dangers of same-sex attraction. Medical school was a scene of sexist harassment, with Rabelaisian professors of women’s medicine, as it was then called, and ignorant male journal editors who rejected her ...”

“... time a friend succeeds, I die a little,’ Gore Vidal said, channelling a similar joke by Oscar Wilde. But La Rochefoucauld is in grim earnest, and Swift plays the translation straight. He restores the comic deficit in the poem itself, a mock obituary projected into the voices of his friends and enemies. But he also makes clear that the maxim is ...”

“... Oscar Wilde called experience the name one gives to one’s mistakes, while for Samuel Johnson it was what hope triumphed over for those who married a second time. Emerson thought all experience was valuable, an opinion not shared by the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay. Plato and Spinoza saw it as a realm of illusion, to be contrasted with the pure light of reason ...”

“... dynamism in Glas; he can’t just tell himself, like Ruskin or de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël or some Oscar Wilde character, that he prefers boys, or statues, and leave it at that. He is drawn into life, away from his observation post. Partly it is his catastrophic choice of profession, partly it is his vanity, partly his 20th-century propensity not to set ...”

“... lesbian imagination. Stein and Toklas, Barney, Romaine Brooks, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Dolly Wilde, Janet Flanner, H.D. – we’ve been hearing about them for ages and the line-up never changes. If anything, thanks to influential (and romanticising) books like Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1986) and Andrea Weiss’s Paris Was a Woman ...”

“... great play, complete with a clinching illustration, of a Viennese ‘al fresco performance’ of Oscar Wilde’s ‘play’, Birthday of an Infanta: ‘Wilde’s play, performed in Velasquez-like costumes, reflected the new commitment of the visual artists to life as refined gesture.’ The historian’s original sin ...”