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“... to an actor) by petrifying himself and his Lyceum into attitudes of patriotic grandeur’, while Oscar Wilde radiated energy into the English theatre by mocking ‘everything that was supposed to inspire Irving’s audiences’. Stoker’s Dracula, in Auerbach’s reading, was a counterattack on behalf of his master. Noting that Irving was knighted on ...”

“... to indulge in a purely selfish prefiguring of the political future. That other Irish transgressor, Oscar Wilde, understood that his own indolence dimly portended the New Jerusalem in which nobody else would have to work either: just lounge on the couch all day and be your own communist society. But he had to pay a heavy price for this prolepsis, in guilt ...”

“... manage the money, although it is true that Ada was extravagant, and notably more so after she met Oscar Wilde. She became Wilde’s fast friend, and for a few golden years was surrounded by London’s artists, actors and first-nighters. (Max Beerbohm, of course, was a second-nighter; he advised on the decoration of her ...”

“... them more or less acceptable. It was a perilous role to play, as Shaw’s friend and admirer Oscar Wilde was to discover. Both Irishmen used wit and epigram to capture the contradictions of the English establishment in an endless flow of paradox which entertained as well as unsettled. With characteristic impudence, Shaw praised Jack the Ripper for ...”

“... Saki’s short stories take place in a world far from the Somme. It’s a world, like that of Oscar Wilde or P.G. Wodehouse, of silk curtains and silver tea sets, though Saki’s is populated not only with tyrannical aunts and obtuse majors, but also with tigers and woodland gods. In ‘Sredni Vashtar’, a boy worships a ferret as a god; the worship ...”

“... at the Café Royal on the fateful afternoon in 1895 when Frank Harris and Shaw tried to dissuade Oscar Wilde from the libel action he had set in train against Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Douglas arrived and dragged Wilde away lest they should succeed. In 1908 there was a tiff by letter when ...”

“... of malice, treachery, deceit, hypocrisy and vanity was wrapped up in such attractive features. Wilde compared him to a pet lion-cub wreaking havoc on reaching actual size, but he was less impressive and more sinister than that, a King Charles spaniel of vicious temperament, a cute Walt Disney rattlesnake, or a beautiful child vampire. He was hardly an ...”

“... walrus’; Gertrude Stein compared him to ‘a very prosperous Mellon’s Food baby’; and Oscar Wilde found his face ‘vague, formless, obscene’. So it is a comfort to find all these cruelties belied in the portrait of Moore by John Butler Yeats, reproduced in Gray’s book. There sits a harmless, walrus-moustached gentleman of 53, a little ...”

“... and – a big plus on anyone’s marksheet because it was so rare – was prepared to stick up for Wilde at the time of Oscar’s fall from grace. As a youngish and middle-aged man, he devoted hours of his time to the largely unrewarding work of a councillor in the St Pancras Ward of London. Thanks to Shaw, the first ...”

“... It has always been​ said of George Meredith that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘as a novelist he can do anything except tell a story.’ ‘Regarding narrative,’ J.B. Priestley declared, ‘every novel that Meredith wrote is not merely faulty but downright bad.’ On Meredith’s centenary in 1928, Arnold Bennett summarised the problem: ‘He wanders vaguely around ...”

“... with more disreputable terms such as ‘con man’ or ‘adventurer’. He is also described as Oscar Wilde’s nephew, which is true up to a point: he was the nephew of Wilde’s wife, Constance. As a writer, Cravan had a brief and stormy career, in Paris, in the years around the outbreak of the First World War. His ...”

“... illustrators who often delighted and sometimes shocked public opinion; the young Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde among the best-known of the writers. And with the often splendid Yellow Book, first published in 1894, the firm achieved real notoriety and inspired innumerable parodies, comic verses and quips. Norman Gale, a long since forgotten poet, produced ...”

“... believe that we shall be such friends. I have two consuming interests – Adolf Hitler and Oscar Wilde.’ Only hours later, or so it seemed to my disordered fancy, we were sitting in a villa that had once housed the Nazi embassy, while he played a tape of The Importance of Being Earnest. He himself took the part of Algernon, while the role of ...”

“... Marx considered, to abolish it as far as possible. The only good reason for being a socialist, as Oscar Wilde knew, is that one objects to doing any work. Whatever its limitations, Morris’s socialism led him to mount stools on East End street corners, and to address six thousand striking Northumberland miners, which is more than can be said for ...”

“... Hawksmoor was preceded by the Eliot biography of 1984, which was preceded by The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde of the year before, and now these annual events have been pressed upon by the new novel, Chatterton. All four books reveal a steady concern with imitation and interpretation, and to read them together is to be clearer about what it is that the ...”