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“... and the authors he quotes from in sufficient detail to wear as an effective disguise include Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, David Lodge and Umberto Eco – he always allots the book he’s citing to one class or another, giving page references from books he admits to not knowing or from one of his own books (Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? no less) he wants us ...”

“... Beardsley, who died at 25, passed his brief life in the fin-de-siècle milieu of Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde. Like them, he was his own artefact. Immensely thin and hollow-eyed with long fingers and a large nose, he seemed to the actress Elizabeth Robins, who met him at a lunch party, to be merely the ‘uncertain ghost of ...”

“... utopias which dream of a society beyond privilege are instances of the privileges they disown: as Oscar Wilde knew, there is something offensively idle and frivolous about thinking up other worlds, a pursuit in which anyone can engage as readily as they can boil an egg. But Wilde was also aware that we fleshly ...”

“... ring radio stations insisting on his estranged son’s Irishness. Morrissey was a lovelorn fan of Oscar Wilde and James Dean, Elsie Tanner and the New York Dolls, and he appears to have made something of an art out of moping around the house in a melancholy, jobless, big-cardiganed way, dreaming of a wonderful romance involving himself and every image he ...”

“... offering a guessing game made up of costumes, travel by coach and horse, and a reference to Oscar Wilde. The last item is more informative than it sounds, more attentive to cinema and refraction, and a nice touch on the part of the screenwriter, Tony McNamara. The Importance of Being Earnest was first performed in 1895, but the characters in Poor ...”

“... To look at it, you would imagine there was a causal relationship; that, as in the later case of Oscar Wilde, the homosexuality led to the fall. But in Halleck’s career there is no fall: no arrest in a hotel room, no judicial examination of the sheets, no being spat at on a station platform, no bankruptcy, no divorce, no hard labour. And – much as ...”

“... but stylistically it became increasingly apparent that Eagleton’s true Penelope was Oscar Wilde: ‘Several of the characteristics that make him appear most typically upper-class English – the scorn for bourgeois normality, the flamboyant self-display, the verbal brio and iconoclasm – are also, interestingly enough, where one might ...”

“... and his ‘much-neglected’ poetry have been unfairly overlooked in all the fuss about Oscar Wilde. Murray has had privileged access to a Home Office file that shouldn’t have been opened till 2043, and his long list of illustrious acknowledgments (again, I’ve only seen an advance proof) includes Lady Eccles and Anthony and Lady Violet ...”

“... was a lot less mortifying, but equally instructive. When a play I wrote some years ago about Oscar Wilde transferred from a tour of Ireland to a London theatre, I overheard a well-bred English woman in the interval asking her companion: ‘Was Wilde really Irish, or is Eagleton making that up?’ A lot of tedious ...”

“... intimates.’ No writer of the Victorian period has had more said about his appearance. Not even Oscar Wilde, who invited such remarks. We know nothing of Meredith’s complexion or the swell of Trollope’s chest; we are left innocent about the ankle-shape of Gissing, the eyes of Mrs Gaskell. Yet we are now duty bound to inspect the Stevenson ...”

“... contempt for Catholic superstition, and spectres throng their fiction from Sheridan Lefanu to Oscar Wilde. Dracula, the creation of a Dublin civil servant, is an Ascendancy sort of ghoul, wistfully poring over maps of London in his mouldering castle and finally deprived, like the Irish landlords, of his life-sustaining soil. The crazed precision of ...”

“... yet of the 280 illustrations that follow, nearly 250 are of women. High fashion, defined by Oscar Wilde as ‘a form of ugliness so unbearable that we are compelled to alter it every six months’, has been a predominantly female phenomenon since the late 18th century. For reasons historians tend to associate plausibly if vaguely with the French ...”

“... bowler hat. He also fell in love, temporarily, with Lillie Langtry, whose velvet-slippered friend Oscar Wilde said that ‘where there is no extravagance there is no love.’ These days the male fashionistas get to drink champagne in the sun and become overnight stars on people’s mobile phones. The London menswear collections stir up a mayflies’ nest ...”

“... was a stern, aloof figure. For a single term he played the fop at Oxford, then drifted into the Oscar Wilde circle. He received a presentation copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol from Wilde and spent six days with him in exile, before taking a calculated decision to drop him. At 21 he inherited money and after a spell ...”

“... work of his middle years. The last third of his own life was largely given to this biography of Wilde, which was in some ways a very different sort of undertaking. There were surviving acquaintances of Joyce, but nobody who knew Wilde is available for questioning; the material, though copious, must be sought in ...”