“... into coherence, if not into sense. There isn’t much she hasn’t read, or doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every ...”

“... bibliomaniac and practising pederast who had compiled a monumental bibliography of Oscar Wilde’, the model for the flamboyant Mr Deacon? Probably. Is there a touch of Peter Quennell in the floppy-haired Mark Members? Is J.G. Quiggin really Cyril Connolly? And is Moreland Constant Lambert? Is Dr Trelawney ‘a projection’ of Aleister ...”

“... in the south-east of Ireland where we lived, to perform his one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar. My uncle, who was a staunch member of Fianna Fáil, the ruling party, and a fervent member of the ruling church – he was later decorated by the Pope – bought us all tickets, and we attended, as did many others in the town, in a family ...”

“... of John Addington Symonds – two years later, thinking of Symonds in connection with the trial of Oscar Wilde, James calls them ‘fond outpourings’ – which constitute a privately printed pamphlet on love between men. ‘The exhibition is infinitely remarkable,’ James says. ‘It’s a queer place to plant the standard of duty, but he does it with ...”

“... continued to devote both emotional and intellectual intelligence to her preparation. She supported Oscar Wilde (as did Henry Irving) while Irving’s son was following popular opinion by describing Wilde’s nemesis Lord Queensberry as ‘a brick’. Holroyd quotes her as saying that ‘language was given me to conceal ...”

“... his sister’s fun-fur jacket. He took Deborah to hear David Bowie and Lou Reed, and read her Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. He showed her a ring binder containing sections labelled ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Novel’. ‘I felt privileged that he had trusted me enough to let me see the extent of his ambitions,’ she writes in her ...”

“... were withheld from him and he had to ask Mussolini himself for permission to look at books by Oscar Wilde and even L’Educazione Fascista. In 1926 he wrote that he had ‘tons, cartloads, households of patience’. A year later he was still confident: ‘I am convinced ... that I won’t have to rot in prison for ever.’ But by 1930, he had become ...”

“... Christian names like new ties. The landlady in ‘Fate, Art, Love, and George’ is named from Oscar Wilde. She is Miss Bunbury and keeps old personal columns with certain appointments encircled in red. For some reason, too, Miss Bunbury refers to Dan Jacobson as ‘David’ – an odd, striking detail, which, in addition to being true, contributes to ...”

“... balance between respect and satire, pleasing the general public as well as the 1890s avant-garde. Oscar Wilde put it on his wall (‘Every poet should gaze at the portrait of his queen’) and when Nicholson modestly responded to praise from Whistler by remarking that the queen was a wonderful subject, Whistler replied: ‘Her Majesty might well say the ...”

“... that two veteran Joyceans, John Wyse Jackson of the Chelsea Press, editor of Flann O’Brien and Oscar Wilde, and the Dublin social historian Peter Costello, should have been inspired to produce a full-length biography of, so to speak, Our Founder. It is in its way a unique undertaking. Hard to think of any other father in the history of ...”

“... humour. A ‘Soul’ and member of the rumbustious Crabbet Club, he once played tennis naked with Oscar Wilde. Impulsive and emotional where women were concerned, he appears to have had an insatiable sexual appetite and a string of mistresses. Though nearly all his correspondence with them has been burned, enough has survived to reveal how staggeringly ...”

“... uniquely, the spirit of the Murdoch and Maxwell media age. But he is, alas, a poor man’s Oscar Wilde, who has put his genius into his life and saved his lack of talent for his work. The Fourth Estate offers just one kind of enlightenment, and should be read by anyone who has ever been puzzled by reviewers who claim inability to stop turning ...”

“... praising Hitler for stopping the growth of Communism. He recites a short poem he’s written about Oscar Wilde. Just before sunset a small aeroplane flies over, dragging an advertising banner. It says: ‘Havana/Madrid. Lobster Dinner. $15.99’. The conversation in Key West is still about the two US civilian aircraft shot down by Cuban MiGs, the dead ...”

“... is quietly respected, where property enjoys all its rights’. From designing for households Oscar Wilde might have visited, De Morgan began writing for the drawing-rooms in which his name could never be mentioned. His novels, composed in the lengthening shadows of Edwardian nostalgia, took their readers back to the favourite reading of their own ...”

“... that on 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 ...”