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“... famous names here, Jarrell’s not one to set beside them. Even in his own country, his biographer William Pritchard says, his reputation ‘is not nearly so firm and pre-eminent as I think it deserves to be’. This biography and a selection from the poems (a severe weeding, no more than a fifth surviving) are meant to put that right. Pritchard’s book is ...”

“... in the dead of winter; and always champagne’. (He didn’t mention the inadequate heating: Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s niece and one of Barney’s lovers, claimed that if you turned the chairs upside down you’d find oysters sprouting underneath them.) The guests were ‘curious, unexpected people’, though mostly important ones: the publisher Marguerite ...”

“... to feel ashamed of not having done the same. But I do not feel so in this case. We know that Oscar Wilde is much revered on the mainland, and it looks as if Kermode has merely been getting the aesthetic Nineties echoed back at him. No doubt Imagism comes in too. He looks at a landscape with half-closed eyes through a mist, or in a Claude-glass, or upside down ...”

“... coterie surely coloured his view of the rights and wrongs in a cause such as the slander suit Sir William Gordon-Cumming brought against Lewis’s clients, the friends of the Prince who claimed that Gordon-Cumming had cheated at cards. But perhaps the most clearcut example of Lewis’s skirting the far edge of ethical conduct was his showing the Prince, on a ...”

“... for the first time, on 29 August 1835, and went to 45 George Street in Southwark, where a lodger, William Bonell, aged 65, let them into his room and left them to it. Shortly afterwards, they were seen in a compromising position by John and Jane Berkshire, the owners of the house. They were surprised while still in the act, a policeman was called and the two ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in editing such works as the collected letters of George Moore, Max Beerbohm – above all, Oscar Wilde – and later, now for many years past, in correcting the proofs of my own books with precision and severity. The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962) constitutes an achievement altogether unusual in its field of ...”

“... It’s a transformation with a venerable Irish history, all the way from Oliver Goldsmith to Oscar Wilde. Unlike Goldsmith and Wilde, however, Heathcliff doesn’t make too impressive a job of impersonating the English upper class. You can take Heathcliff out of the Heights, but you can’t take the Heights out of ...”

“... was ‘stupid looking’. Edmund Gosse said he was ‘as restless and questing as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of ...”

“... time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.’ It is safe to assume that the Oscar Wilde of ‘The Decay of Lying’ would feel far more at home in the America of William Jefferson Clinton than in that of its most esteemed founding father. For whatever else may be accused of falling into decay these ...”

“... the last half-century to wear a crown’), Lenin and Chekhov, Bismarck, Curzon, Balfour, Tolstoy, Wilde, Proust, a couple of Czars, and so on. All are written with care and informed by strong opinions. Lenin, who ‘gave no more thought to the unbearable burdens of the Russian peasant’ than the Czar Alexander, is, like most statesmen, treated with ...”

“... came Eric, born 1883 (according to the family tree) or 1884 (according to the timeline); and William, born 1884 (family tree) or 1886 (timeline). A pair of quantum children, impossible to pin down! The journey between continents took place in 1892 (timeline) or 1893 (according to the ship’s manifest quoted). Hinton himself died in 1904 (family tree) or ...”

“... According to Oscar Wilde, before Dickens there were no fogs, and before Turner no sunsets. Wilde is merely exaggerating a truth, practising the art of aphorism, drawing our attention to this precept: we need art so that we can see what we are seeing. On his way to the Hebrides, Dr Johnson pulled down the blind on what a future generation of writers would take for their subject-matter – wild, ‘romantic’ nature ...”

“... William De Morgan’s Life, death and reputation form a curious episode in the history of taste. He died, in 1917, a famous Edwardian novelist, and was almost forgotten. Nearly half a century later he was rediscovered as a great Victorian ceramist. Appropriately, the technique in which he excelled as a potter, lustre, is one that has itself been several times lost, rediscovered and discarded again by different civilisations ...”

“... first Benjamin, later Habermas in The Function of Criticism (1984), to some extent Bakhtin in William Shakespeare (1986) – 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 ...”