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“... 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, ...”

“... was your family? FW: Well, my mother was the daughter of Ada Leverson, who was a friend of Oscar Wilde: he called her the Sphinx. She was very literary. I don’t think my mother would have said she was literary herself, though she did later write books, which were published. My father was much older than my mother. She was a VAD in the First ...”

“... his years as a spy. He was going under the moniker of George Crosley when Hiss knew him. Not since Oscar Wilde regretted the ugliness of his serving boy while under oath has any cleverly crafted reply exacted such a stiff price. One of these days I’m going to write a book called ‘Guilty as Hell: A Short History of the American Left’. Revisionism has ...”

“... relationship between Bassanio and Antonio made me think of the relationship between Oscar Wilde and Bosie where a sad old queen regrets the opportunistic heterosexual love of a person whom he once adored.’ This is indeed a superimposition – more acceptable, perhaps, in 1970 than at some other periods of Time. Alternative dumb-shows ...”

“... luxury brands and misjudged quotes from European writers. (‘True love suffers, and is silent,’ Oscar Wilde offers in the epigraph.) Where Henao’s book is a cautious reckoning polished by decades of therapy, Loving Pablo is an insider’s account written with an eye to the tabloids. Which, of course, was a winning sales strategy: the book became a ...”

“... The same piece of work might mean different things at different times to the same person, as Oscar Wilde wrote of the Tannhäuser overture, which on one occasion summoned up images of ‘that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass’ and the next ‘the poison of unlimited desire’. Ross’s book goes beyond description or ...”

“... It’s a thrill to see him turn his eye on his own circle. On 7 April 1892, for instance: ‘Oscar Wilde next to me at lunch. He has the oddity of being an Englishman. He offers you a cigarette, but selects it himself. He does not walk around a table: he moves the table out of the way. A face worked over by tiny red worms, long cavernous teeth. He ...”

“... By 1901 surprises had included the invention of the telephone, two Boer Wars and the trial of Oscar Wilde. ‘Temper’ is an elusive quality, but from the early 1870s it was shifting. The last three Victorian decades were different, more doubtful and more divided, than the vigorous High Victorian years. From the world of Landseer and Dickens to that ...”

“... will do, and they are as often heroes as outcasts. Crisp was first an outcast and then a star; Oscar Wilde went the other way, while Byron was both at the same time. Whatever the experience of individuals, the essence of bohemia as an idea, which is Wilson’s real subject, is a critique of middle-class values, a love-hate relationship between inside ...”

“... of those they love.’ He’s just thinking aloud, even if Camus is glancing at Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde. His main impression of the court that tries him is that it’s ridiculous, but he’s alert enough to remind himself that this impression is stupid, ‘because what they were looking for here was not the ridiculous but the criminal’. And ...”

“... points of the novel (others were Warhol and Werner Herzog and Kierkegaard and Otto Rank and Oscar Wilde) was the first season of The Hills, an American structured reality show that began on MTV when Heti was 28: ‘I was like, what if we cast ourselves as those girls have been cast?’ The Hills followed blonde best friends trying to make it in ...”

“... and hybrid) modern art. When Bomberg went to Paris with Epstein in 1913 – in the wake of the Oscar Wilde tomb scandal Epstein had all the right contacts – he went straight to the source. ‘Picasso,’ he reminisced later, maybe forcing the note a little, ‘was appreciative of my aims.’ (What did Bomberg show him? The breakneck drawings of ...”

“... its own intentions. Benjamin Markovits, The Syme Papers Poor Bunbury died this afternoon. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest If everyone says Tom did it when the man who did it was Will, the result is what one calls an error, and Will is done out of his due. If while everyone says Tom did it you see Will and hail him as Tom, error ...”

“... to Der Sandmann and The Winter’s Tale and Cinderella, there are described performances of Wilde’s Salome, Barrie’s Peter Pan, Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, at least three separate versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and two plays written by Olive Wellwood and staged by August Steyning, The Fairy Castle and Tom Underground.) Even her ...”

“... the narrator responds to the ruling with bravado: ‘First there was Socrates, then Jesus, then Oscar Wilde, and now me. We’re a select few … No great life is complete without a trial, you have to ruffle a few feathers, you can’t just be a good little child all your life.’ She decides to become a ‘lonesome cowboy’. Sex is the answer, the ...”