“... are occluded. The major sex scandals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries involving Parnell, Wilde and Casement are all treated as if they took their meaning primarily in a context of British repression and misrepresentation. Although the Kincora scandal makes a brief appearance for similar reasons, there is nothing about the divorce and abortion ...”

“... executed as were untold thousands of Irish rebels), and in Autobiographies he remembers how Oscar Wilde once remarked to him: ‘we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.’ In one of his open letters to United Ireland he warns that a nation can become ‘thoroughly stupified by oratory’, and here Yeats the ...”

“... Only Place for Sex.’ After Paul’s arrival in Germany, this is confirmed by his second mentor William Bradshaw (Isherwood): ‘Everybody in Berlin is equal ... It all comes down to sex.’ Sexuality, in this view, is an egalitarian force. ‘Nakedness is the democracy of the new Germany,’ Paul reflects after he has been taken to the open-air swimming ...”

“... Barber and Clark even suggest that she stands in the same symbolic relation to the 1990s as Wilde did to the 1890s. Sedgwick’s academic work and her personal life are braided together to a degree exceptional even in the era of the academic star system, because she has written so frankly about herself and her S/M sexual fantasies, alongside studies (to ...”

“... And has been a diver in the deep seas, And keeps their fallen day about her . . . Oscar Wilde (‘The Critic as Artist’, 1891) comments perceptively on this seductive Pateresque blarney – ‘the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing’ – but the idea of the Mona ...”

“... Firesides contest with the inscription ‘Yea, I have a goodly heritage.’ Unexpectedly, however, William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Thomas Scopes for promoting evolutionary theory in the 1920s, turns out to have been less of a villain than he is usually painted. Scopes may have famously defended evolution, but he was also a keen advocate of ...”

“... diseases. ‘Know syphilis . . . and all things clinical will be added unto you,’ the great Sir William Osler had said. But it was vital to get things right. Drugs were available, but they were dangerous and expensive. In the untreated, symptoms could disappear quickly, as the organism went to ground, only to re-emerge randomly and unpredictably decades ...”

“... to the crowd at a John Lewis sale, and similar remarks were made about the Iraq War protests. William Morris, a leading figure in the SDF, was issued with a summons for obstruction in July 1886, six years after his firm had been commissioned to decorate the throne room at St James’s Palace. In a demonstration on the afternoon of 1 March ...”

“... dramaturg of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, someone who could claim, like Oscar Wilde, a symbolic relation to his time. The husband whose agonising death from emphysema she watched in California in 1980 (this is the book to give a smoker you love for Christmas) was a lost, wasted man whose misery and sense of exile stare hauntingly out of ...”

“... of whether Rhodes was justified in his obsession with ‘expansion’ has long gone stale. William Kelleher Storey’s new Life turns our attention from Rhodes the visionary to the ruthless coloniser, who often pitted himself against imperial officialdom and its watery idealism. He is interested mainly in the persistence with which Rhodes created ...”

“... and is no more wounding or incisive in his prose than he is in his cartoons. The absurd figure of William Deedes, for example, is represented thus on page 47: I have watched with a strange sort of gloom as the paper has wallowed and yawed and eventually driven herself on the rocks while Bill has grinned and joked at his desk. And thus on page 79: I got a ...”

“... nominally under Sir Gilbert, but more delicate and more respectful of post-medieval fabric. William Morris’s firm came in to do glass and tiles. Soon he had a separate office and had turned aesthete. Greek Thomson, the Glasgow classicist, encountered him at dinner in 1871, where Scott ‘made his appearance in black knee breeks black silk stockings ...”

“... the dining room: Confidential Chats with Boys (1911) by the American physician and sex-pamphleteer William Lee Howard. Dr Howard urged teenage boys to ‘sleep on the floor, anywhere: go without sleeping’ rather than share a bed with another boy or a man. And if it couldn’t be avoided, ‘keep awake with your eyes on something you can hit him with. At the ...”

“... about the progress of the script, which needless to say never got written. Firbank rather than Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear Pepys. The persistent excellence of the ...”

“... ought to be extended. Add to it Bomberg and Epstein in Whitechapel before the Great War (with William Roberts and others as possible recruits), snarling at Wyndham Lewis’s safe Soho Bohème: they are as close as the capital ever came, I think, to a genuine homegrown (meaning homeless and hybrid) modern art. When Bomberg went to Paris with Epstein in ...”