“... 1901 surprises had included the invention of the telephone, two Boer Wars and the trial of Oscar Wilde. ‘Temper’ is an elusive quality, but from the early 1870s it was shifting. The last three Victorian decades were different, more doubtful and more divided, than the vigorous High Victorian years. From the world of Landseer and Dickens to that of Henry ...”

“... to the bench and declared: ‘Your Honour, like Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Edmund Burke, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, I occasionally have difficulties with the English language.’ Peals of laughter around the ...”

“... case, involving a supposed register of 47,000 British perverts kept in the cabinet noir of Prince William of Wied. The upshot was a wave of anti-homosexual feeling not unlike that which greeted the downfall of Wilde. But did Coward absorb this salutary lesson? Bumptiously cultivating men of letters, he met and greatly ...”

“... playing on mental associations, the villains deploy skills that resemble those of Collins himself. William Wilkie Collins was born in 1824, with a large, deformed head and tiny feet, to a governess who had wanted to be an actress and a painter whose pursuit of wealthy sitters had turned him into something of a snob. The actor ...”

“... and BBC contemporaries included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by ...”

“... The schoolmaster William Johnson is remembered for three things, although not under that name. He wrote the most famous of all translations from Greek lyric verse, ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’; he wrote the words of the ‘Eton Boating Song’; and in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust ...”

“... York as part of Walter Arensberg’s circle, which included Duchamp, Picabia, Varèse, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. She sketched Freud in Vienna and lived among the avant garde in postwar Berlin. In the Twenties, when American expatriates flocked to Paris, Loy was there too. In accounts of those years, Loy’s charm and wit are emphasised, and her ...”

“... We all​ judge by appearances. Oscar Wilde said that it is ‘only shallow people’ who don’t, but it might be truer to say that they fail to pay attention to the judgments they are making while they dismiss appearances as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought ...”

“... says ‘he entertained a culte for the literature that is now called “ninetyish” – Pater, Wilde and Dowson.’ Almost as soon as a decade became a label, there were people who did not wish to have it stuck to them – Arthur Machen, the magus of the fantastic, although a paid-up member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, insisted to the end of his days ...”

“... it featured comic clerics), the satire ceased to offend – which meant, as the Victorian critic William Archer pointed out, that it ceased to be satire. In fact, it was a sort of apotheosis. Gilbert’s caricatures made W.H. Smith, Sir Garnet Wolseley and Oscar Wilde popular celebrities. Wolseley was so tickled by being ...”

“... featuring such plays as Mrs Warren’s Profession (Shaw, 1894), The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde, 1895), and various selections from Shakespeare’s oeuvre, including the late romances. Blue knows the theory, but gets no practice. When her father agrees to settle in Stockton, North Carolina, for her senior year, she finally gets an opportunity to use ...”

“... Canal shares) and the transformer of English queens into empresses of India. Peel, reincarnated as William Gladstone, denounces him from beyond the grave. Gladstone sweeps to victory, Byron is toppled and Peel is avenged. Byron dies, leaving posterity perplexed. Had he been a writer who happened to become prime minister, or a prime minister who happened to be ...”

“... sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with Arthurian and Norse literature far superior to this tedious Teutonic competitor.But rivalry and resistance can also be modes of reception, and the most astute Wagnerians were those who grappled agonistically with ...”

“... face on the narrow green sofa. The expression is childlike: ‘It was the look he recorded in William Dorrit’s face in death; it was the look which he saw in the faces of the corpses on view in the Paris Morgue. This connection between death and infancy is one that had haunted him; sleep, repose, death, infancy, innocence, oblivion are the words that ...”

“... to be publicly named.’ (As a cub reporter in Pittsburgh in the 1890s, Cather had covered the Wilde debacle – with horrified revulsion.) She loved in secret, but love she did, and like a hidden flame, her surreptitious devotion to members of her own sex both animated and refined her art. However turgid, O’Brien’s psychosexual portrait of Cather was ...”