“... Huxley could not afford to be seen in the wrong company: one evening his artistic daughter brought Oscar Wilde home – Huxley declared that Wilde was never to come to the house again. And so he constructed a respectable, almost a pious agnosticism (the word is his neologism) while distancing himself from the political ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are embarrassing in life and horrific on the printed page. The English upper orders learned from Oscar Wilde how to abhor earnestness and embrace triviality, but even Wilde would appear strained next to the Mitfords. The lesson of the girls: it’s not what one says but how one says it. English prose is in love with ...”

“... of the 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 ...”

“... ideological soap opera is London, a genteel hotbed of reformist debate, despite the jailing of Oscar Wilde and the snail’s pace of women’s suffrage. Havelock Ellis contributed his scientific zeal to the Fellowship of the New Life, and Olive Schreiner enlivened the Men and Women’s Club. Eleanor Marx felt obliged to decline membership there for ...”

“... care for criticism: when Geoffrey Grigson at New Verse turned down his poem about the arrest of Oscar Wilde he stood on the backside of the White Horse at Uffington and cursed him. In these years he must, despite all the appearances, have been working extremely hard. His output included newspaper gossip, profiles, film criticism, articles about ...”

“... the other’s knee. They were in bed, on the beach, picnicking, posing on car bonnets. For every Oscar Wilde, there were the 27 mostly anonymous men questioned in the early 1890s for John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, who with delightful candour describe early experiences, favourite sexual positions and relationships past ...”

“... 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 portrayed as Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance that he learned the show-stopping ‘Modern Major-General’ patter-song and performed it at parties. Gilbert communicated no real ...”

“... mathematician Mary Somerville – there is a sizeable and equally endearing dose of egotism. As Oscar Wilde observed, the personal memoir, even if written for friends and family alone or to satisfy an importunate publisher, is always delightfully self-obsessed. The very genre of the scientific autobiography is a 19th-century invention: we learn about ...”

“... creation of a mannered self-image corresponding to the stylisation of her art’. Following in Oscar Wilde’s footsteps, Loy decided to become a work of art. Her first marriage, to Stephen Haweis, an English painter and photographer, was unhappy. The strain of Haweis’s numerous affairs and the death of their daughter, of meningitis, two days after ...”

“... selves and the possibility of discovery were essential elements. As 1895 opened, for example, Oscar Wilde could move between intimate family life and, when he grew bored with that, a life in hotels and foreign places. He could mingle with the great and the good and then pleasurably spend time with young men from a different, mostly a lower, social ...”

“... visible, in developments that were publicly dramatised in – though far from confined to – the Wilde trials.’ Kosofsky Sedgwick is careful not to push the matter further, but other writers – Woods calls them ‘Post-Foucauldian’ – have taken the view that until the time of the Wilde trial there wasn’t really a ...”

“... the 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 ...”

“... are not invited isn’t worth living,’ Calasso declares in conscious or unconscious parody of Oscar Wilde on the subject of utopias. But the necessary consequences of inviting the gods were rapes, abductions, sacrifices and the beginning of history. The gods for their part were gratifyingly interested in human beings but could not help regarding them ...”

“... one of the most mournful chapters in the history of European civilisation. Ninety years ago Oscar Wilde was condemned to walk the treadmill at Pentonville Prison six hours a day for alleged indecency. Less than fifty years ago, after the Nazi seizure of power, homosexuals in Germany were being sent in their thousands to concentration camps, in ...”