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“... the girl to the absorbing society of transplanted Anglo-America. Taken to the hospitable home of William Wetmore Story in Rome, a handsome apartment in the Palazzo Barberini, she met people who had known George Eliot, Thackeray, the Brownings. This, even at the age of 12, was a world where she felt instantly at home. Among the many details uncovered by ...”

“... they separated within ten months. Three years after that, she took up with the architect Edward William Godwin. They did not marry, but had a daughter and son together, and the expense of their upkeep drove her back to the stage. Her performance as Portia in The Merchant of Venice drew her to the attention of Henry Irving, an emerging actor-manager who ...”

“... and fitted up, with the greatest beauty and elegance, a palace,’ one satisfied guest, Oscar Wilde, said, ‘and fitted it with gems of art, for the use and benefit of the public, at hotel prices.’ Perhaps stung by this last clause, Russell-Cotes’s second palace, East Cliff Hall, was wholly uncommercial. It was presented first as a gift to his ...”

“... scientists such as Richet and, earlier, the pioneering physicist and Fellow of the Royal Society William Crookes, who in the 1870s had speculated about a fourth, ‘radiant’, state of matter, lent authority to the cause of English psychic research. When Dr Richet held séances in his villa on the island of Roubaud in the South of France in the summer of ...”

“... of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me immediately who he was. He was William M. Murphy himself, the author of Prodigal ...”

“... disgraceful that you’ve mucked around with it.’ The copy of A Human Document that Oscar Wilde had in his room also has an interference in it.*GP: What kind?TP: He spilt some jam on it. The librarian in charge of the Oscar Wilde collection pointed this out. Rather nice, isn’t it? So I’m not the first person to ...”

“... and Manet in the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, as did the American Thomas Eakins in his painting of William Rush carving the Schuylkill River. The point in all these paintings is to distract the viewer from the conditioned simplicity of sexual allegory, itself resembling that of sexual response, so that we feel an equal participation with the sexes as well as ...”

“... Oscar Wilde called experience the name one gives to one’s mistakes, while for Samuel Johnson it was what hope triumphed over for those who married a second time. Emerson thought all experience was valuable, an opinion not shared by the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay. Plato and Spinoza saw it as a realm of illusion, to be contrasted with the pure light of reason ...”

“... the world is likely to ring hollow in a down-at-heel colony. Contemporary Irish philosophers like William Desmond and Joseph Dunne have inherited this anti-rationalist bias, either in postmodern or Wittgensteinian mode. It says much about this wariness of pure reason that Toland, the country’s most militant rationalist thinker, also traded in the ...”

“... Prologue without a nasty collision of plural and singular: ‘His associates ... included Oscar Wilde, briefly, and Wilde’s “Sphinx”, Ada Leverson, and her husband. It included, too, William Rothenstein.’ Guided by her personalised Muse, Ms Benkovitz swoops on Beardsley’s ...”

“... 15-minute lecture on the history of the criminalisation of homosexuality from the Romans to Oscar Wilde. But Lovecraft eventually gives in and one of the many virtuosic inventions of The Night Ocean is the secret code Lovecraft and Barlow (whom he calls ‘Barlovius’) devise for encrypting their doings: they ‘Do an Ebony Boxe’ and ‘Make an Elder ...”

“... the management of the Civil Service, which was then reaching a pitch of folly under the late Sir William (afterwards Lord) Armstrong’. On the Look-Out is also, it should be said, often very funny, with touches of dry, sometimes self-mocking humour that can almost escape notice. This, for instance, is how he describes his resignation, under a cloud, from ...”

“... his mother, Dawn Chadwick, and their old friend (or acceptable enemy, depending how you read it), William Nelson. These people are all failures, all refugees, all victims. Chadwick is a failed stockbroker. Nelson is a man in what used to be known as ‘reduced circumstances’: a failure in banking, a refugee from the nightmare memory of watching a close ...”

“... begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s ...”

“... But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – could have been included, but the three poets in question ...”