“... inspired by Peter Ackroyd’s imaginary conversation between Chatterton, T.S. Eliot, Dickens and Oscar Wilde in his biography of the Great Inimitable. By such techniques, Ackroyd believed, biography could become an ‘agent of true knowledge’, liberating itself from the tyranny of the merely documentary. Taylor agrees. These novelistic excursions are ...”

“... after this larceny, I actually wrote a paper of my own. It was for a seminar on Roland Barthes and Oscar Wilde. That professor (Bob Scholes) suggested I try to publish the thing. So I submitted it to Genders, which secured two supposedly anonymous readers. One, though, was D.A. Miller (possibly Catholic). And the other was Eve. The journal had neglected ...”

“... scandal-lapped, self-dramatising monstre sacrée surfaces in Joy Melville’s Mother of Oscar, a life of Lady Wilde, once famous as ‘Speranza’, the seditious Dublin belle of the potato famine. Born Jane Elgee, she too ran amok in the Classics and fantasised about her ancestors. In the late 1840s she wrote ...”

“... versions of homosexual life in this period, rivalling in its documentary value the lives of Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement, and differing from them in its calm, domestic bliss and lack of a tragic ending. Soon after meeting Merrill, Carpenter began a correspondence with Symonds, The question for both of them was how to explain their own ...”

“... for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in 1907, so too James Joyce managed to kill his father when in 1904, at the age of ...”

“... included William Gladstone, Joseph and Austen Chamberlain, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. (A hand-reader pronounced Wilde’s head line ‘very strongly marked, showing extraordinary brain power and profound scholarship’.) The high-end chirologists advertised distinctions between what they ...”

“... heightened social formality taken to the point at which mastery is its own kind of subversion. Was Oscar Wilde oppressed by the rules of high Victorian manners? No, because it was a scoring system he could master and its manipulation was the making of him. He was oppressed by the game he could not play, which demanded conformity to sexual codes that ...”

“... and never shall be – but only a writer who varies fiction with verse.’ Almost a year later, Oscar Wilde recorded a similarly modest assessment of Plain Tales from the Hills, turning his phrase like a bayonet. If Kipling’s title could boast of its artlessness, the unvarnished simplicity of its artistic means, ...”

“... was your family? FW: Well, my mother was the daughter of Ada Leverson, who was a friend of Oscar Wilde: he called her the Sphinx. She was very literary. I don’t think my mother would have said she was literary herself, though she did later write books, which were published. My father was much older than my mother. She was a VAD in the First ...”

“... to Der Sandmann and The Winter’s Tale and Cinderella, there are described performances of Wilde’s Salome, Barrie’s Peter Pan, Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, at least three separate versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and two plays written by Olive Wellwood and staged by August Steyning, The Fairy Castle and Tom Underground.) Even her ...”

“... of those they love.’ He’s just thinking aloud, even if Camus is glancing at Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde. His main impression of the court that tries him is that it’s ridiculous, but he’s alert enough to remind himself that this impression is stupid, ‘because what they were looking for here was not the ridiculous but the criminal’. And ...”

“... The same piece of work might mean different things at different times to the same person, as Oscar Wilde wrote of the Tannhäuser overture, which on one occasion summoned up images of ‘that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass’ and the next ‘the poison of unlimited desire’. Ross’s book goes beyond description or ...”

“... It’s a thrill to see him turn his eye on his own circle. On 7 April 1892, for instance: ‘Oscar Wilde next to me at lunch. He has the oddity of being an Englishman. He offers you a cigarette, but selects it himself. He does not walk around a table: he moves the table out of the way. A face worked over by tiny red worms, long cavernous teeth. He ...”

“... relationship between Bassanio and Antonio made me think of the relationship between Oscar Wilde and Bosie where a sad old queen regrets the opportunistic heterosexual love of a person whom he once adored.’ This is indeed a superimposition – more acceptable, perhaps, in 1970 than at some other periods of Time. Alternative dumb-shows ...”

“... and hybrid) modern art. When Bomberg went to Paris with Epstein in 1913 – in the wake of the Oscar Wilde tomb scandal Epstein had all the right contacts – he went straight to the source. ‘Picasso,’ he reminisced later, maybe forcing the note a little, ‘was appreciative of my aims.’ (What did Bomberg show him? The breakneck drawings of ...”