“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Verlaine’s soul.Better artists slow-pedalled their conversions, for fear of the connection that Oscar Wilde identified ‘between Faith and bad art’. Raffalovich introduced the tubercular imp Aubrey Beardsley to a priest, but he only agreed to be received into the Church once he was ailing fast. From his deathbed in Menton, he instructed his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... elected member of the Commune’s council, he walked to an inspiring death. Hazan writes: ‘When Oscar Wilde was asked what had been the saddest event of his life, he replied that it was the death of Lucien de Rubempré in Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life. If I had to answer the same question, I would choose the death of Delescluze on the barricade of ...”

“... parlour games and nibbling at the edges of philosophical debate, sometimes in the company of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, H.G. Wells and the Webbs. Today they are easily characterised as an unripened Bloomsbury Group: a celebrity clique composed of men and women unconventional in dress and conversation, literary and artistic, overlapping in their ...”

“... frivolous persona was a negation of the Nazi ideology of womanhood. She smoked, drank wine, read Oscar Wilde, listened to jazz and spent huge amounts of money on clothes. She had no children and wasn’t married to her lover until the very end – far from the stoical patriotic mother of Goebbels’s propaganda. In and of itself, this is perhaps less ...”

“... the Morrells, not to mention Robbie Ross, as loyal and wise a friend to Sassoon as he had been to Oscar Wilde. But he made it in his own way, and when he had made it, he characteristically refused to pursue it in the way they wanted, by doing ‘something else outrageous’, to use Lady Ottoline’s phrase. On the contrary, with apparent meekness he ...”

“... could fulfil and middle-class consuming women relishing their power to make dreams come true. Oscar true. Oscar Wilde got there before either Campbell or Loeb when he spoke of the ‘strange mixture of romance and finance’ which is the bourgeoisie. Isabella Beeton could on occasion think in a thoroughly ...”

“... white crop. (At Harvard in 1900 Stevens parted his hair in the middle and was a ringer for Oscar Wilde.) When Brodsky was sentenced for ‘social parasitism’ in 1964 in the Soviet Union, the judge made some remark about his ‘velvet pants’; I pricked up my 19th-century ears, but it was merely a fragrant mistranslation of corduroy.To ...”

“... well for himself on bread and fish, directing his reputation, mingling with the Celtic showmen Oscar Wilde and Dylan Thomas, with Dickens of the spittoons and Trollope of the politicians, with the missile makers in New Mexico and the clever German Jewish Left clustered unhappily around Hollywood, retailing the old world and its soft wisdom to the ...”