“... that played to packed houses. Yet there was also Boucicault and, at the end of the century, Wilde. The theatres themselves were designed in a style for which McWilliam has coined the apt term Populist Palatial. Almost the only building type to prove immune to the Victorian Gothic revival, they remained for the most part grandiosely neoclassical. One ...”

“... theme, or alarm, throughout these books. In 1950, Herbert Read, reviewing the unexpurgated text of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, described Lord Alfred Douglas, who had died only five years before, as ‘the most complete cad in history’. The birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes, who’d been a friend of Douglas’s and thought his sonnets ‘second only ...”