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“... could fulfil and middle-class consuming women relishing their power to make dreams come true. Oscar true. Oscar Wilde got there before either Campbell or Loeb when he spoke of the ‘strange mixture of romance and finance’ which is the bourgeoisie. Isabella Beeton could on occasion think in a thoroughly ...”

“... and once remarked that only three interesting things had happened there – the incarceration of Oscar Wilde, T.E. Lawrence losing the manuscript of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the meeting between Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse in the Patrick Hamilton novel of that title. But he had a devoted reader there, and I believe that the most revealing piece ...”

“... and a few dozen like it a prudent man would have hung a reputation as neatly contained as that of Oscar Wilde or Francis Jeffrey. But there was something in Hazlitt more buoyant, without the pause and the turn for effect. Paulin has captured this sense of him wonderfully. Has he left out anything? He writes so well about an innovative usage of the word ...”

“... across the stage of the Apollo Theatre in my first play, Forty Years On. It was a parody of Oscar Wilde. I was in drag as a putative Lady Bracknell and wheeled by John Gielgud. ‘I can walk,’ I said, ‘only I’m so rich I don’t need to.’20 July. Another hot day, too hot to be out of doors, until lying on the sofa trying to work in the late ...”

“... white crop. (At Harvard in 1900 Stevens parted his hair in the middle and was a ringer for Oscar Wilde.) When Brodsky was sentenced for ‘social parasitism’ in 1964 in the Soviet Union, the judge made some remark about his ‘velvet pants’; I pricked up my 19th-century ears, but it was merely a fragrant mistranslation of corduroy.To ...”

“... took a very dim view of homosexuality because he had deeply disapproved when I told a joke about Oscar Wilde at the debating society. And when a friend, who looked slightly effeminate in any case, began to part his hair in the middle, he was told by Father Collins that it was better to part it at the side; a middle parting, he said, was a sign of ...”

“... superstition about numbers. As soon as numbers come into play, we are all liable to fall into what Oscar Wilde called ‘careless habits of accuracy’. A number holds out the promise of definiteness, exactness and objectivity. But a number is a signifier like any other, a way of representing something. We appeal to numbers as a way of replacing ...”

“... well for himself on bread and fish, directing his reputation, mingling with the Celtic showmen Oscar Wilde and Dylan Thomas, with Dickens of the spittoons and Trollope of the politicians, with the missile makers in New Mexico and the clever German Jewish Left clustered unhappily around Hollywood, retailing the old world and its soft wisdom to the ...”

“... text’. The Parker and Taylor whom the Italian resents being in the company of were associates of Oscar Wilde, who had been sentenced for homosexual offences a year earlier.The irony here is that, though the Italian was entirely right in his scepticism, the case study became the generic basis for what we now call the ‘gay novel’, offering as it does ...”

“... with boys in the South Pacific; Bram Stoker, who visited Whitman in Camden; and, later on, Oscar Wilde who visited twice in 1882. Wilde remarked: ‘there is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honour so much.’ Whitman, if one may judge by his scattered discussions of these figures with ...”

“... on Spencer’s knowledge, there are none on his willingness to go beyond them. Everyone, as Oscar Wilde never said, should know something about love and history – except, of course, the historians of love. This is a relatively modest imputation of sentiments to Wilde, as Homosexuality: A History makes ...”

“... today’s Rosenkavalier needs a signature. Huge crowds at the Abbey for the unveiling of the Oscar Wilde window, both transepts full with people standing (some on chairs) to catch a glimpse of the speakers. The most notable is of course the 90-year-old Gielgud, black overcoat, velvet collar, a half-smile always on his lips as of someone prepared to ...”

“... competition, especially as frémir lends support to frissonner. As an admirer of Huysmans, Oscar Wilde had recourse to the ‘shudder’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray. A high proportion of these instances occur in commonplace expressions such as ‘I shudder at the thought’ or ‘a shudder passed through’ whoever it was, examples which tend ...”

“... delight’, there is a voice in the wings whispering something not unlike what Auden said of Oscar Wilde – ‘Alone, he does not know who he is.’ The unanchored ‘you’ that often appears is Auden talking partly to himself and partly to another, a lover, a reader, an antagonist, uncertain about how close these shady characters can or should be ...”

“... she was still with Willy. ‘A genre she has made her own.’ ‘The Tendrils of the Vine’ is an Oscar Wilde-ish just-so story about how the nightingale found its voice: to save itself from death by suffocation from the plants that would grow all over it if it were ever to stop. The prose itself is ‘hooked’, as Kristeva puts it, sprouting out all ...”