“... a league of notions that are no more than bons mots, as felicitous or as facile as the epigrams of Oscar Wilde – a playwright who was always blamed for his coups de théâtre, Camus offers instead fatalist coups de philosophe that will never abolish Wilde. Thanks to shifting official attitudes in Mexico, and to its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... He​ ‘fell down on my threshold like a wounded stag’, Willie Wilde wrote of the moment his younger brother, Oscar, out on bail after the collapse of his first trial for gross indecency, arrived at the small house on Oakley Street that Willie shared with their mother. The image of the stag – too mannered, too detached – suggests a fundamental failure of sympathy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a puritanical German public that had been scandalised by recent court cases and the fall of Oscar Wilde, and to keep Mann himself safe from suspicion. Homosexual critics have called Mann cowardly not to have shown Aschenbach in a more positive light. Seen in the context of the time, however, Mann had a lot to lose by obviously sympathising, let ...”