“... trenches, she shared a flat in Montparnasse with several other girl-drivers, one of whom, Dolly Wilde, louche niece of Oscar and member of the expatriate lesbian circle around Natalie Barney, became an early and important love. Wilde introduced ‘Joe’ (as she was now known) to ...”

“... protagonists as they saw themselves. In one sense, her method is similar to that of Sir William Wilde who, in studying wasting illnesses in Irish children, placed the scientific and vernacular taxonomies side by side in his reports. Sir William is famous in Ireland not just for being Oscar Wilde’s father but also ...”

“... in 1959. Like Padilla and Hurtado, I convinced Pablo to come back to Cuba from the States. Oscar Hurtado, also an economic exile in New York, a dear giant of a man, like the family elephant, but an incredible shrinking poet, inimical to Lezama and his Origines group, who died not only unrecognised but unrecognising in an asylum, suffering silently and ...”

“... the act as pioneering but outdated, it calls for a further change in the law.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 ...”