“... 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 ...”

“... set out. In the version of the story in which the couple found her, she was clutching a book by ...”

“... Bellay, he alludes to the author of The Renaissance as ‘the don who fell on his knees to present Oscar Wilde with a lily’. The ritual castrations of this father performed earlier in the 20th century, which may attest to an anxiety of influence that belies the smear of impotence, are surely unnecessary today. It is interesting to hear Sisson on ...”

“... It is the essential languor of the habit which lends it such an excellent tone in this respect, as Oscar Wilde understood so well when he described it as an occupation. Kiernan thrills to his own description of Greta Garbo blowing out a match in The Flesh and the Devil, and vibrates as he recalls Paul Henreid taking a smoke from his own lips and passing ...”

“... plays and poems, Swinburne’s novels, the Marquis de Sade’s psychology, the mystery of Oscar Wilde, the American Indians, Haitian fiction, Russian poetry, Malraux’s theory of art – there isn’t an unclear or inelegant sentence, an unnecessary theory or an overt ideological sentiment. He remained a patient explainer, reliable guide, and ...”

“... it is the brainy world of an artist whose delight lies in hoaxing and masking. The line to Oscar Wilde is ...”

“... of the 19th and 20th centuries of being terrible, unspeakable, horrid. Visitors like Kipling or Oscar Wilde had said all kinds of memorable and cutting things about Chicago. On the other hand, there was the speed with which Chicago had built itself, the speed with which it had recovered its prestige after the great fire. There are all the world records ...”

“... after passing a shibboleth test imposed by Hugh Gaitskell, who asked: ‘What do you think of Oscar Wilde and all that?’ Her reply, ‘Oh, I think that’s quite all right,’ was spoken with the assurance of one who ‘had not really thought much about it’. After this avowal of broad-mindedness (the tale has already been told in Philip ...”

“... her neighbours. She would occasionally be glimpsed, however, on her own at a small restaurant on Oscar Wilde Street, or in the back seat of a car being driven through the streets, often by night, looking out the window, the interior lights never on. Sometimes she would ask her chauffeur to buy her French cheeses from a delicatessen. She avoided ...”

“... never adopted the 1967 act, the 1861 Offences against the Person Act – the one that imprisoned Oscar Wilde – substitutes for it. Any pregnant woman ‘with intent to procure her own miscarriage … shall be guilty of felony … and being convicted thereof shall be liable … to be kept in penal servitude for life’ (this remains the maximum ...”

“... a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work. For Oscar Wilde, who was closer in this respect to Marx than to Morris, communism was the condition in which we would lie around all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping ...”

“... into a world of private beauty. Where does that leave the flamboyant figures of Whistler and Oscar Wilde? One might rather see aestheticism as an ebullition of self-confidence: it is when people feel safe that they can afford to risk the pleasures of trying to épater les bourgeois. In social terms Macleod recognises that the Aesthetic Movement sees ...”

“... colour was green. He wore green suits, shirts and sunglasses. This was not in emulation of Oscar Wilde. He detested the primacy accorded to art over life, and detested homosexuals even more. Paul Claudel, the Catholic writer-diplomat, undiplomatically called the Surrealists a bunch of ‘pederasts’. Breton was outraged, not only because in his ...”

“... still awaits a poet to make her known.’ Her husband most certainly did not make her happy, but Oscar Wilde volunteered for the poet’s position and spent a night composing a poem to her on the steps of her house – ‘To Helen, formerly of Troy, now of London’ – and tutored her in Latin and Greek (essential languages for a goddess). But it looks ...”

“... ideas of the self in psychology and literature. Pamela Thurschwell’s fine study of Henry James, Oscar Wilde and George du Maurier1 showed how profoundly the developments in ‘magical thinking’ reverberated in fiction and its portrayal of character and perception; and Malcolm Gaskill recently tackled, with amused brio, the life and times of the last ...”