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“... still awaits a poet to make her known.’ Her husband most certainly did not make her happy, but Oscar Wilde volunteered for the poet’s position and spent a night composing a poem to her on the steps of her house – ‘To Helen, formerly of Troy, now of London’ – and tutored her in Latin and Greek (essential languages for a goddess). But it looks ...”

“... of the 19th and 20th centuries of being terrible, unspeakable, horrid. Visitors like Kipling or Oscar Wilde had said all kinds of memorable and cutting things about Chicago. On the other hand, there was the speed with which Chicago had built itself, the speed with which it had recovered its prestige after the great fire. There are all the world records ...”

“... after passing a shibboleth test imposed by Hugh Gaitskell, who asked: ‘What do you think of Oscar Wilde and all that?’ Her reply, ‘Oh, I think that’s quite all right,’ was spoken with the assurance of one who ‘had not really thought much about it’. After this avowal of broad-mindedness (the tale has already been told in Philip ...”

“... colour was green. He wore green suits, shirts and sunglasses. This was not in emulation of Oscar Wilde. He detested the primacy accorded to art over life, and detested homosexuals even more. Paul Claudel, the Catholic writer-diplomat, undiplomatically called the Surrealists a bunch of ‘pederasts’. Breton was outraged, not only because in his ...”

“... It is the essential languor of the habit which lends it such an excellent tone in this respect, as Oscar Wilde understood so well when he described it as an occupation. Kiernan thrills to his own description of Greta Garbo blowing out a match in The Flesh and the Devil, and vibrates as he recalls Paul Henreid taking a smoke from his own lips and passing ...”

“... never adopted the 1967 act, the 1861 Offences against the Person Act – the one that imprisoned Oscar Wilde – substitutes for it. Any pregnant woman ‘with intent to procure her own miscarriage … shall be guilty of felony … and being convicted thereof shall be liable … to be kept in penal servitude for life’ (this remains the maximum ...”

“... set out. In the version of the story in which the couple found her, she was clutching a book by ...”

“... ideas of the self in psychology and literature. Pamela Thurschwell’s fine study of Henry James, Oscar Wilde and George du Maurier1 showed how profoundly the developments in ‘magical thinking’ reverberated in fiction and its portrayal of character and perception; and Malcolm Gaskill recently tackled, with amused brio, the life and times of the last ...”

“... her neighbours. She would occasionally be glimpsed, however, on her own at a small restaurant on Oscar Wilde Street, or in the back seat of a car being driven through the streets, often by night, looking out the window, the interior lights never on. Sometimes she would ask her chauffeur to buy her French cheeses from a delicatessen. She avoided ...”

“... a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work. For Oscar Wilde, who was closer in this respect to Marx than to Morris, communism was the condition in which we would lie around all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping ...”

“... after this larceny, I actually wrote a paper of my own. It was for a seminar on Roland Barthes and Oscar Wilde. That professor (Bob Scholes) suggested I try to publish the thing. So I submitted it to Genders, which secured two supposedly anonymous readers. One, though, was D.A. Miller (possibly Catholic). And the other was Eve. The journal had neglected ...”

“... versions of homosexual life in this period, rivalling in its documentary value the lives of Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement, and differing from them in its calm, domestic bliss and lack of a tragic ending. Soon after meeting Merrill, Carpenter began a correspondence with Symonds, The question for both of them was how to explain their own ...”

“... scandal-lapped, self-dramatising monstre sacrée surfaces in Joy Melville’s Mother of Oscar, a life of Lady Wilde, once famous as ‘Speranza’, the seditious Dublin belle of the potato famine. Born Jane Elgee, she too ran amok in the Classics and fantasised about her ancestors. In the late 1840s she wrote ...”

“... for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in 1907, so too James Joyce managed to kill his father when in 1904, at the age of ...”

“... and never shall be – but only a writer who varies fiction with verse.’ Almost a year later, Oscar Wilde recorded a similarly modest assessment of Plain Tales from the Hills, turning his phrase like a bayonet. If Kipling’s title could boast of its artlessness, the unvarnished simplicity of its artistic means, ...”