“... first Benjamin, later Habermas in The Function of Criticism (1984), to some extent Bakhtin in William Shakespeare (1986) – but stylistically it became increasingly apparent that Eagleton’s true Penelope was Oscar Wilde: ‘Several of the characteristics that make him appear most typically upper-class English – the ...”

“... social groups – in effect, the licence of the lawless aristocrat. From Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde, the aristocrat and the anarchist have always been secret bedfellows. If the English love a character, they also love a lord, which is one reason Byron (who was literally an aristocrat) and Wilde (who was spiritually ...”

“... Dante Gabriel Rossetti​ could always cheer himself up by belittling William Morris. At the top of a letter to Jane Morris in 1868, he scribbled a crest for ‘The Bard and Petty Tradesman’ in which Morris, plucking a lyre beneath a laurel tree, is back-to-back with his double, who is leaning over his shop counter ...”

“... rather than form, and has no inhibitions about separating the two. The laurels of Pater and Wilde were still green in her formative years and their attempts to discredit meaning must have seemed to threaten her, but fortunately Pater kept contradicting himself and Wilde was far too silly. (His comment ‘All bad ...”

“... father of Nicholas Mosley’s girlfriend, exclaiming: ‘But I would rather shake hands with Oscar Wilde than with Oswald Mosley!’ Mosley was not amused but bemused: ‘Does her father think I’m a bugger?’ ‘No, Dad, it’s not that he thinks you’re a bugger.’ But one of the good things about the anecdote must be its onomastic antics: for Oscar was ...”

“... between the last two categories. The Heroes section would include pieces on Tom Paine and Oscar Wilde, a passionate vindication of Noam Chomsky (‘among the few Americans of his generation to lay claim to the title of original thinker’) and a long, thoughtful portrait of Professor Shahak, the great Israeli human rights activist. There is a strikingly ...”

“... poet is the work of the poet and the work of the poet is the life of the poet.’ This is Oscar Wilde as rewritten by Tennessee Williams. The author of that gruesome playlet must have had in mind the notorious Algerian meeting near the fin de siecle in which Wilde, holding Bosie’s hand, boasted before a timid André ...”

“... Yeats’s patron Lady Gregory came to collect folklore in the West of Ireland, her future husband William had been busy drafting the notorious Gregory clause in the depths of the Great Famine, which deprived thousands of relief-seeking small farmers of their paltry piece of land and was no doubt responsible for a fair number of unnecessary deaths. Steadily ...”

“... fir. The sea poem had come a long way from ‘Casabianca’. As a historian, Carr is ecumenical: William Brooke Smith, a student who died of tuberculosis in 1908, is given as much consideration as Pound’s other early friend William Carlos Williams; Marianne Moore, who matriculated at Bryn Mawr in the same year as ...”

“... us are going to need. Is the evil found or imagined? The writers of the film – Truman Capote and William Archibald, the author of the stage play on which it was based – were accused of going too much for the ‘psychological’ reading of James’s tale, most famously advanced by Edmund Wilson: there are no ghosts, it’s all in the governess’s mind. She ...”

“... Bellow replied that his study had been English literature. He was asked to give his opinion of William Wordsworth as a poet. He responded that he had always thought of William Wordsworth as one of the Romantics. ‘There is no place for you,’ said Chambers on hearing this, ‘in this organisation.’ The future Nobel ...”

“... the same day in March 1895 as the Fifth and deciding Test Match was starting in Melbourne, Oscar Wilde ‘incautiously applied for a warrant against the Marquess of Queensberry on grounds of libel’, and a shade melodramatically, two months later, that ‘as Wilde was led away to be broken on the treadmill, Grace set ...”

“... by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on Biblical narrative, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on D.H. Lawrence, and on Structuralism, which Lodge as late as 1980 regarded as ‘the most significant ...”

“... and textual constructions, the chest was ‘real’, as was its supposed original owner, William Canynge, a prosperous citizen of 15th-century Bristol. And the chest did contain early vellum documents, which Chatterton used to construct his fakes. The chest eventually became such a mythic object that even Dr Johnson heaved himself to the top of the ...”

“... writers whose style she admired. She also championed Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams. She did some work for Italian radio and wrote a few prefaces, mostly for works by religious figures.One such preface, to a 1966 edition of Weil’s Waiting for God, caused an uproar. Although Campo had long been an admirer of Weil, her ...”