“... at the Dial office and entertained writers in his flat, where there were rare first editions, Beardsley drawings, Chinese and Japanese furniture, a Japanese manservant called Oni (who subscribed to the Nation) and no chairs. The décor expressed both Thayer’s aesthetic lushness – Adolf Dehn portrayed him in a caricature as ‘le Byron de nos ...”

“... most impressive collections of Victoriana. David was drawn to the glass case full of rare books by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. “Oh!” he cried. “You’ve got this one!” ’ Bowie did not want to pose as a respectable gay: under the new legislation it would be better to pose as a shocking and daring gay. He was not conspicuously gay in his ...”

“... it would be even more true to itself. Here we are in a private world – a world where, as in Beardsley’s drawings, we tread with fascinated horror, unbounded admiration and a sense of being total and probably unwanted strangers. This room is now ashes, but it is proposed to reconstruct it faithfully. How perverse that the sort of modernists who ...”

“... He learnt what he could from the great fashion illustrators, the society cartoonists, Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm, but he got most of what is fresh in his drawings from a New-York-in-the-Fifties world of homosexual felicity, a literary world of gentle other-persuasion, whose emergent prince was Truman Capote. In ...”

“... 71. Not many creators in the ephemeral arts have a chance to preside over their own rebirth. From Aubrey Beardsley to Busby Berkeley, they are usually at the mercy of crudely over-enthusiastic interpreters who work on the verge of parody, carrying admiration near the limit and often over the edge of camp. In the late-Fifties revival of the ...”

“... has been launched into space wearing Percy’s pelt.It gets stranger. Brophy worshipped Aubrey Beardsley, who often drew embryos, she believed, to express ‘the consumptive poet’s dread that his body’s unfitness will make him cease before his pen has gleaned the teeming brain inside that huge foetal skull’. In the epilogue to ...”

“... its short criss-crossed brushstrokes, as well as the wonderful picture of a tubercularly elongated Aubrey Beardsley, but at the Tate these are unhelpfully shown in two other rooms.Nevertheless,​ there is a sense of drift. R.H. Wilenski, in his contribution to a catalogue published in 1943, wrote that Sickert ‘was a late, an astonishingly late, starter ...”

“... supporter, protector, attenuated lover, in the powerful figure of C.B. Cochran, a schoolfriend of Aubrey Beardsley, who ruled the entertainment side of the London theatre for nearly fifty years. Late in life, she told me that she never ‘went all the way’ with Cochran, and asked me, ‘Do you understand?’ as though the secrets of sexuality were ...”