“... 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 ...”

“... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...”

“... as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... woman, Florence Barger, as confidante. All this is fair enough; Forster, when he agreed first that William Plomer and then P.N. Furbank should write his biography, did not ask that matters of this kind should escape discussion. He lived the greater part of his life under a hated law that banned and might brutally punish his kind of sexuality; it long blighted ...”

“... revenge as Kipling’s ‘Dayspring Mishandled’. Not half as curious, though, as the story of William Morton Fullerton (1865-1952) himself, as pieced together by his last female pursuer. This handsome, dark, blue-eyed, dapper, short American (Henry James gives him much longer legs as Merton Densher, as well as turning him into an Englishman), owner of a ...”

“... the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and ...”

“... In Cakes and Ale (1930), William Somerset Maugham has Willie Ashenden – his narrator and stand-in – explain that, in reputation-building terms, ‘longevity is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety ...”

“... a well-earned shift of emphasis. Hazlitt would have learned this way of thinking from his father, William Hazlitt Sr, a notable sermon-writer whose work was published by Joseph Johnson, the publisher of Wordsworth and Blake. Yet the morality of Dissent always seemed to press up against a crisis of belief. The Antinomians in New England made the challenge most ...”

“... for a long time in London with Hester Travers Smith, the author of Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde. In the years between Beckett’s arrival in Paris in 1928, where he and McGreevy taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and the outbreak of the Second World War, the years in which the letters in this volume were written, McGreevy was Beckett’s ...”

“... from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays his part and is heard no more, but the part I would have you play hath more will in it than wit.”’ Has there been a year when such a book would make the Booker ...”

“... United States, the one she had been reading since she was a teenager. Its editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, no longer worked in tandem as they had in the old days; Phillips alone discovered Sontag and took her up as a representative and promising young writer. He memorably misassigned her to the journal’s theatre column, the post that had been held ...”

“... land, The leaf that hurts the hand.to the anapaestic anarchy of his running commentary on the 1895 Wilde trial, which opens: ‘Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?/And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?/And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?/Oh they’re taking him to prison for the ...”

“... Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William Phillips, who co-edited Partisan Review with Rahv, described her as ‘one of our most cutting minds’, ‘charming even when most devastating or malicious’. Isaiah Berlin said she was ‘much more bitchy’ than Mary McCarthy, ‘but sharper and more ...”

“... He speaks the exuberant and strangely wooden children’s chorus of the Middle German poet Der Wilde Alexander: ‘Here we ran swilling strawberries/from oak to pine,/through hedges, through turnstiles –/so long as day was burning down’ (‘Children’). He gruffs out a rather Bukowskian Rimbaud: ‘But it was terrific when the house-girl/with her ...”

“... you are happy and well. Write soon and thank you very much for ringing me. All my love. As Oscar Wilde said, please believe me. Yours, George.The relationship gradually deteriorated, partly because Dyer had nothing to do except wait for Bacon to come drinking with him – partly because, Stevens and Swan suggest, he had ‘lost his self-respect when he gave ...”