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“... 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 ...”

“... today’s Rosenkavalier needs a signature. Huge crowds at the Abbey for the unveiling of the Oscar Wilde window, both transepts full with people standing (some on chairs) to catch a glimpse of the speakers. The most notable is of course the 90-year-old Gielgud, black overcoat, velvet collar, a half-smile always on his lips as of someone prepared to ...”

“... competition, especially as frémir lends support to frissonner. As an admirer of Huysmans, Oscar Wilde had recourse to the ‘shudder’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray. A high proportion of these instances occur in commonplace expressions such as ‘I shudder at the thought’ or ‘a shudder passed through’ whoever it was, examples which tend ...”

“... delight’, there is a voice in the wings whispering something not unlike what Auden said of Oscar Wilde – ‘Alone, he does not know who he is.’ The unanchored ‘you’ that often appears is Auden talking partly to himself and partly to another, a lover, a reader, an antagonist, uncertain about how close these shady characters can or should be ...”

“... she was still with Willy. ‘A genre she has made her own.’ ‘The Tendrils of the Vine’ is an Oscar Wilde-ish just-so story about how the nightingale found its voice: to save itself from death by suffocation from the plants that would grow all over it if it were ever to stop. The prose itself is ‘hooked’, as Kristeva puts it, sprouting out all ...”

“... to a double sense in which some things can be taken.’ ‘Notes on “Camp”’ was dedicated to Oscar Wilde and quotations from him were interspersed throughout the text. Her final entry on a list of camp items was ‘stag movies seen without lust’. Who watches stag movies without lust? Gay men. (Women don’t really exist in the essay.) ‘Who is ...”

“... a Victorian novel in its clinical detail and its poignant sentimentality. I can imagine having the Oscar Wilde response – ‘one must have a heart of stone’ to read it and not laugh – but I went for it. The room, saturated with love, mirrored the many holidays and weekends we had all spent together over the years. I stroked Paul’s ...”

“... be congested with allusions. Take ‘The Fictions of America’: Jacques Vaché, André Breton, Oscar Wilde, Melville, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Erasmus, all within the first three paragraphs. Some appreciate Hardwick’s tacit assumption of her readers’ sophistication; the ...”

“... than the proprietary solidity of permanent ownership. This is why strolling dandies like Oscar Wilde or Baudelaire seem to me intrinsically more interesting than extollers of settled virtue like Wordsworth or Carlyle. For the past five years I have been writing two columns a month for the Arabic press; and despite my extremely anti-religious ...”

“... through initial ignorance about the demand public action makes on one’s time. Hirschman quotes Oscar Wilde to the effect that socialism couldn’t work, because it would take too many evenings, and Rousseau to the effect that men must devote themselves either wholly to the state or wholly to their private pursuits. Moreover, the problems of dirty ...”

“... service is first rate and wholly uncondescending. Whirled along, I am reminded of a line in the Oscar Wilde parody I put in Forty Years On, when the bathchair-bound Lady Dundown remarks: ‘I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.’24 November. With every day bringing news of fresh improprieties, a part of me regrets a line I cut ...”

“... was part of their work and of themselves: they were performers as much as writers; while Oscar Wilde’s clothes were an ironic complement to his writing. A leading member, with his wife, Constance, of the Rational Dress Society, which campaigned to remove the constraints of conventional clothes, especially the corsets and bustles that afflicted ...”

“... He lodged for a long time in London with Hester Travers Smith, the author of Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde. In the years between Beckett’s arrival in Paris in 1928, where he and McGreevy taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and the outbreak of the Second World War, the years in which the letters in this volume were written, McGreevy was ...”

“... in the sense adopted by his fictional Maurice Hall (‘I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’) – but also his worries and rages (‘Last night, alone, I had a satanic fit of rage against mother for her grumbling and fault-finding, and figured a scene in which I swept the mantelpiece with my arm and then rushed out of doors or ...”

“... do hope you are happy and well. Write soon and thank you very much for ringing me. All my love. As Oscar Wilde said, please believe me. Yours, George.The relationship gradually deteriorated, partly because Dyer had nothing to do except wait for Bacon to come drinking with him – partly because, Stevens and Swan suggest, he had ‘lost his self-respect ...”