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“... others to toil for profit. But is work fun? And could we ever abolish its most degrading forms? Oscar Wilde – who bought Morris wallpapers – wondered what such ideals meant to the street sweeper forced to labour for eight hours at the ‘slushy crossing’.Morris took refuge from such conundrums in stories serialised in socialist papers and then ...”

“... We all​ judge by appearances. Oscar Wilde said that it is ‘only shallow people’ who don’t, but it might be truer to say that they fail to pay attention to the judgments they are making while they dismiss appearances as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought ...”

“... as Miss Lotti, the parasol-carrying, self-effacing homebody, who broke with Harland because Oscar Wilde’s trial besmirched the Yellow Book’s reputation, and as Charlotte Mew, the poet and headbanger, who fell for Harland’s assistant Ella d’Arcy, and pursued her to Paris. For two months in 1902 Mew gloomed up and down the Champs ...”

“... the thrill and satisfaction that accompany his tableaux of chaos and maiming. It is the ghost of Oscar Wilde, whose loyal confidant Robbie Ross had befriended Owen some months before the drafting of ‘Strange Meeting’, who haunts the violent Liebestod enacted in the poem’s conclusion:I am the enemy you killed, my friend.I knew you in this dark, for ...”

“... she hoped ‘consciously or subconsciously’, to have him out of the country during the trial of Oscar Wilde. We may well be incredulous, especially when it is further conjectured that she might have stopped taking newspapers at the same period. It was a school holiday and the Forsters had a Whichelo relation in Rouen, perfectly ordinary reasons for the ...”

“... children. Such a positive attitude to bestiality, presented with a sophistication reminiscent of Oscar Wilde or Maurice Chevalier, is implicitly supported by the book’s many illustrations, which are for the most part frankly pornographic. They are seldom mentioned in the text and often bear no perceptible relationship to it, but Dekkers does discuss ...”

“... newly-appointed dramaturg of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, someone who could claim, like Oscar Wilde, a symbolic relation to his time. The husband whose agonising death from emphysema she watched in California in 1980 (this is the book to give a smoker you love for Christmas) was a lost, wasted man whose misery and sense of exile stare ...”

“... from barbarism to decadence is praised as if it had been conceived by Muggeridge, instead of Oscar Wilde. When Professor Hunter finds time to read other philosophers he might discover that such an example of an epigram being borrowed, and muffed in the borrowing, is characteristic of Muggeridge’s essentially second-hand intelligence. But on the ...”

“... as I found I had to create characters who could conceivably have had memories of, say, the age of Oscar Wilde, Lawrence of Arabia and of Bloomsbury. Hence the Claridge’s couple, Hugh and Moggie. When I subsequently hit on the (fairly obvious) idea of a school play, with the school itself a loose metaphor for England, it resolved much that had made me ...”

“... by little, as the fires were lit, the smoke and the mist returned.’ This sort of fogolatry made Oscar Wilde observe that London fogs ‘did not exist until Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique.’Joseph Conrad used fog judiciously but to fine effect when writing ...”

“... turned to the bench and declared: ‘Your Honour, like Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Edmund Burke, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, I occasionally have difficulties with the English language.’ Peals of laughter around the courtroom, even the ...”

“... not only a desperation at the doom he has assigned to homosexuals – he alludes to the fate of Oscar Wilde in his very next words – but a deeply romantic love of the idea of doom itself. But any comparative verdict on the old and new translations is going to be a very rough summary of a complicated game. Along the way the new translation is ...”

“... Oscar​ Wilde once said that ‘Royal Irish Academy’ was a ‘triple oxymoron’. I have recycled this joke quite a few times, in respect of the Hong Kong Literary Festival – which, even while I was doing it, felt slightly unfair. Or rather, no longer fair. The Hong Kong of my childhood was, at least in expat circles, a definitively unliterary place ...”

“... a symptom both creditable and, in certain circumstances, dangerous. His own laborious edition of Oscar Wilde’s letters reaches its final or perhaps one should say penultimate stage in Volume VI; the references to that author throughout the correspondence – for the work took years – are innumerable, and, hardened indexer though he is, he settles at ...”

“... Allen for publishing an article suggesting that a large number of her audience at the opening of Oscar Wilde’s Salome were German spies. Lord Alfred Douglas used the occasion of the trial to accuse Wilde’s friend Robert Ross of being the ‘leader of all the sodomites in London’.)Siegfried’s face ...”