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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and once remarked that only three interesting things had happened there – the incarceration of Oscar Wilde, T.E. Lawrence losing the manuscript of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the meeting between Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse in the Patrick Hamilton novel of that title. But he had a devoted reader there, and I believe that the most revealing piece ...”

“... and a few dozen like it a prudent man would have hung a reputation as neatly contained as that of Oscar Wilde or Francis Jeffrey. But there was something in Hazlitt more buoyant, without the pause and the turn for effect. Paulin has captured this sense of him wonderfully. Has he left out anything? He writes so well about an innovative usage of the word ...”

“... across the stage of the Apollo Theatre in my first play, Forty Years On. It was a parody of Oscar Wilde. I was in drag as a putative Lady Bracknell and wheeled by John Gielgud. ‘I can walk,’ I said, ‘only I’m so rich I don’t need to.’20 July. Another hot day, too hot to be out of doors, until lying on the sofa trying to work in the late ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... took a very dim view of homosexuality because he had deeply disapproved when I told a joke about Oscar Wilde at the debating society. And when a friend, who looked slightly effeminate in any case, began to part his hair in the middle, he was told by Father Collins that it was better to part it at the side; a middle parting, he said, was a sign of ...”

“... superstition about numbers. As soon as numbers come into play, we are all liable to fall into what Oscar Wilde called ‘careless habits of accuracy’. A number holds out the promise of definiteness, exactness and objectivity. But a number is a signifier like any other, a way of representing something. We appeal to numbers as a way of replacing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... text’. The Parker and Taylor whom the Italian resents being in the company of were associates of Oscar Wilde, who had been sentenced for homosexual offences a year earlier.The irony here is that, though the Italian was entirely right in his scepticism, the case study became the generic basis for what we now call the ‘gay novel’, offering as it does ...”

“... with boys in the South Pacific; Bram Stoker, who visited Whitman in Camden; and, later on, Oscar Wilde who visited twice in 1882. Wilde remarked: ‘there is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honour so much.’ Whitman, if one may judge by his scattered discussions of these figures with ...”

“... on Spencer’s knowledge, there are none on his willingness to go beyond them. Everyone, as Oscar Wilde never said, should know something about love and history – except, of course, the historians of love. This is a relatively modest imputation of sentiments to Wilde, as Homosexuality: A History makes ...”