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“... to a double sense in which some things can be taken.’ ‘Notes on “Camp”’ was dedicated to Oscar Wilde and quotations from him were interspersed throughout the text. Her final entry on a list of camp items was ‘stag movies seen without lust’. Who watches stag movies without lust? Gay men. (Women don’t really exist in the essay.) ‘Who is ...”

“... a Victorian novel in its clinical detail and its poignant sentimentality. I can imagine having the Oscar Wilde response – ‘one must have a heart of stone’ to read it and not laugh – but I went for it. The room, saturated with love, mirrored the many holidays and weekends we had all spent together over the years. I stroked Paul’s ...”

“... than the proprietary solidity of permanent ownership. This is why strolling dandies like Oscar Wilde or Baudelaire seem to me intrinsically more interesting than extollers of settled virtue like Wordsworth or Carlyle. For the past five years I have been writing two columns a month for the Arabic press; and despite my extremely anti-religious ...”

“... be congested with allusions. Take ‘The Fictions of America’: Jacques Vaché, André Breton, Oscar Wilde, Melville, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Erasmus, all within the first three paragraphs. Some appreciate Hardwick’s tacit assumption of her readers’ sophistication; the ...”

“... through initial ignorance about the demand public action makes on one’s time. Hirschman quotes Oscar Wilde to the effect that socialism couldn’t work, because it would take too many evenings, and Rousseau to the effect that men must devote themselves either wholly to the state or wholly to their private pursuits. Moreover, the problems of dirty ...”

“... service is first rate and wholly uncondescending. Whirled along, I am reminded of a line in the Oscar Wilde parody I put in Forty Years On, when the bathchair-bound Lady Dundown remarks: ‘I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.’24 November. With every day bringing news of fresh improprieties, a part of me regrets a line I cut ...”

“... was part of their work and of themselves: they were performers as much as writers; while Oscar Wilde’s clothes were an ironic complement to his writing. A leading member, with his wife, Constance, of the Rational Dress Society, which campaigned to remove the constraints of conventional clothes, especially the corsets and bustles that afflicted ...”

“... He lodged 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 ...”

“... in the sense adopted by his fictional Maurice Hall (‘I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’) – but also his worries and rages (‘Last night, alone, I had a satanic fit of rage against mother for her grumbling and fault-finding, and figured a scene in which I swept the mantelpiece with my arm and then rushed out of doors or ...”

“... do hope 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 ...”

“... society. As a student, Yeats often joined his parents to dine at the house of Sir William and Lady Wilde, as his son would later dine at the house of Oscar Wilde in London. The lawyer and politician Isaac Butt had been a college classmate of his father’s and remained a close friend, close enough for John Butler ...”

“... Gregory, Patrick Pearse – and, perhaps more significantly, manages to recruit figures such as Wilde, Joyce and Beckett, placing them posthumously in the pantheon of post-colonial writers who, by revolting into style, created a nation. He wants everyone who put pen to paper in Ireland in these years to lie down in the bed of nation-building, and he is ...”

“... dancer and actress called Maud Allan, who had recently appeared in two private performances of Oscar Wilde’s Salome: enough to generate moral fury in Pemberton Billing and his gang. He was prosecuted for alleging Allan’s involvement in an article in Vigilante called ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’. The trial involved a close and hilarious ...”

“... Istanbul. He visited Paris for the first time and announced his presence to his famous relation, Oscar Milosz. The old man received him in a bird-filled hotel room in Fontainebleau, having previously sent a cheque with orders to buy a new suit. Oscar Milosz, who wrote entirely in French, had known ...”

“... of my life. Nothing remains but the shelter of her arms. A page or so later she writes: O Oscar! am I peculiarly susceptible to sexual impulse? I must be, I suppose – but I rejoice. Now, each time I see her [I want her] to put her arms round me and hold me against her. I think she wanted to too; but she is afraid and custom hedges her in, I ...”