“... the act as pioneering but outdated, it calls for a further change in the law. ‘Not since the Oscar Wilde trial,’ Ashley comments on Corbett v. Corbett in her 2006 memoir, The First Lady, ‘had a civil matter led to such socially disastrous consequences.’ For Justice Ormrod, the case – ‘the first occasion on which a court in England has been ...”

“... 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 ...”