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“... André Gide made his life the very core of his art. In that way he was quite different from Oscar Wilde, who was 15 years his senior and, for a brief but crucial period, a friend. Wilde may have said he put his genius into his life and merely his talent into his art: what is indisputable is that he was careful to keep them well apart ...”

“... have been distorted by their legend, like Dr Johnson and Byron. Those of less certain status, like Oscar Wilde, have been left by it in a sort of limbo, where we never know what it is we are being asked to admire, their life-style or their art. Edith Sitwell comes in this class, and Victoria Glendinning’s biography brings these dubieties to the surface ...”

“... all levels and in all respects, of the ‘English’ that spun his world. Eagleton’s interest in Oscar Wilde is profound. He identifies strongly with the English-Irish Oxfordian as the classic double agent from (as James Joyce has it) one of the capitals of duplicity, ‘Doublin’. The piquant blend of patrician and Paddy, of levity and high ...”

“... to persist beyond a moment or two of genial acknowledgment. To fall in love with oneself may, as Oscar Wilde observed, be the beginning of a lifelong romance, but to fall in love with the lengthened shadow of one’s writerly possibilities as projected by the mellow light of kindly critical attention – that is the beginning of folly. The act of ...”

“... to do is lay your finger alongside your nose and mention ‘the brilliance of a young poet called Oscar Wilde’, or mount an exchange like this:     ‘Has anyone ever come across this bearded scribbler called James?’     ‘A friend, surely, of darling Tourgenieff’s?’ asked Eggy.     ‘Who spoke enthusiastically of him to ...”

“... prisoners call the sky; indeed, his work has little of the wistfulness of our own (unpardoned) Oscar Wilde. He interposes himself between his text and the reader in an entirely natural way. He is not the self-conscious puppetmaster of so much self-consciously ‘modernistic’ fiction, but a writer painfully aware of material and reader in a way that ...”

“... in 19th-Century America’. Quotations from writers like Byron, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Emerson, Oscar Wilde, Louisa May Alcott, Turgenev and Tolstoy (lots of Tolstoy – no one has written more memorably about balls) precede each section and raise the intellectual tone. The format is coffee table and the style olden days: the text is printed in double ...”

“... when they are so posh, polite, worldly and composed? They talk like Henry James – no, like Oscar Wilde parodying Henry James. When a candle goes out with a crashing noise, terrifying the governess, Miles smoothly says: ‘It was only the wind, my dear.’ But then they can’t be guilty, busily conspiring with ghosts, just because we don’t like ...”

“... though a civil action might succeed. She reluctantly decided not to pursue the matter. When Oscar Wilde, who had often adorned Lady Lewis’s salon, got into his great trouble, he did not ask Lewis to represent him, possibly because, as Juxon speculates, he preferred to deal with a lawyer with whom he had not been on terms of friendship. When ...”

“... game to play, inevitably popular.’ Before long, tennis was attracting celebrity endorsements: Oscar Wilde, an early enthusiast, lent it louche glamour; Prince Alfred renewed the royal connection with the game by setting up a court at Buckingham Palace. Within a year tennis was a feature of country house parties, and soon the craze spread to ...”

“... Thornton, in another good essay, points out that the term was less available after the trial of Oscar Wilde: Symons planned a book called The Decadent Movement in Literature, but when it appeared in 1899 it was called The Symbolist Movement instead, and it expressly condemned Decadence, though Symons also liked to argue that it referred to a merely ...”

“... he had settled and still lives. ‘Out of curiosity I write about what I don’t know.’ Like Oscar Wilde, Trevor invented and occupied his own England of the mind, a place so completely and successfully imagined that his novels, from The Old Boys to The Children of Dynmouth, have become bywords for a certain kind of Englishness. But it was an ...”

“... 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary quoted Oscar Wilde, or so she thought. ‘Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue,’ she said, only that’s not Wilde but La Rochefoucauld.The vanity and the intoxication with power is overwhelming. ‘You know,’ Hillary ...”

“... known then by his given name of Peter) admit to being what his family called a pansy, or an Oscar Wilde. ‘I was a Battersea pansy, wary of displaying his true colours in the sunlight,’ since it was well known to the Baileys and their friends that there were no pansies in a decent working-class area like Battersea. The basis of Bailey’s book ...”

“... well that one can only presume that potential litigants are worried about the possibility of an ‘Oscar Wilde Scenario’ – i.e. that they would surface from a libel suit even less fragrant than they were when they went in. Either Morrell is a fiction writer of rare but paranoid talents, or he and his company were, as he says, the victims of a plot ...”