“... 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 ...”

“... society. As a student, Yeats often joined his parents to dine at the house of Sir William and Lady Wilde, as his son would later dine at the house of Oscar Wilde in London. The lawyer and politician Isaac Butt had been a college classmate of his father’s and remained a close friend, close enough for John Butler ...”

“... Gregory, Patrick Pearse – and, perhaps more significantly, manages to recruit figures such as Wilde, Joyce and Beckett, placing them posthumously in the pantheon of post-colonial writers who, by revolting into style, created a nation. He wants everyone who put pen to paper in Ireland in these years to lie down in the bed of nation-building, and he is ...”

“... dancer and actress called Maud Allan, who had recently appeared in two private performances of Oscar Wilde’s Salome: enough to generate moral fury in Pemberton Billing and his gang. He was prosecuted for alleging Allan’s involvement in an article in Vigilante called ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’. The trial involved a close and hilarious ...”

“... Istanbul. He visited Paris for the first time and announced his presence to his famous relation, Oscar Milosz. The old man received him in a bird-filled hotel room in Fontainebleau, having previously sent a cheque with orders to buy a new suit. Oscar Milosz, who wrote entirely in French, had known ...”

“... of my life. Nothing remains but the shelter of her arms. A page or so later she writes: O Oscar! am I peculiarly susceptible to sexual impulse? I must be, I suppose – but I rejoice. Now, each time I see her [I want her] to put her arms round me and hold me against her. I think she wanted to too; but she is afraid and custom hedges her in, I ...”

“... both having boarded with her at different times. (Hester’s books included Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde.) Hester and Dolly were to become the third mother and daughter in Yeats’s circle who provoked interest in the same men. George thought Hester ‘the unbending hard essence of everything I loathe mentally, emotionally and temperamentally. She ...”

“... unscrutinised. Homosexual preference didn’t have to be incompatible with heterosexual marriage. Oscar Wilde’s marriage can’t simply be dismissed as a matter of social form; neither can Stoker’s. Both men courted the same woman, the Irish beauty Florence Balcombe. She chose Stoker but got little joy from it, and Skal suggests that at the end of ...”

“... oppression and subordination: a sea nymph raped by Poseidon; Mary Josephine Travers, who accused Oscar Wilde’s father of sexual assault; the wife of the Victorian apocalyptic painter John Martin; a figure based on Edward Hopper’s painting Hotel Room; a girl caught up in a sexual abuse case; a woman prisoner. These monologues are all effective for ...”

“... Barber and Clark even suggest that she stands in the same symbolic relation to the 1990s as Wilde did to the 1890s. Sedgwick’s academic work and her personal life are braided together to a degree exceptional even in the era of the academic star system, because she has written so frankly about herself and her S/M sexual fantasies, alongside studies (to ...”

“... stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever needed an eye surgeon (which she did not), and his mad wife, Speranza, had lived, where they had raised their son Oscar, who was four years dead by this ...”