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“... Raphael’). Above all, however, this is a social comedy of wooing, as funny as can be. Not even Oscar Wilde could have got away with a character as preposterous as ...”

“... have built 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 ...”

“... and a most philanthropic man, who propagandised energetically for tolerance towards Oscar Wilde. But, of all unutterable sillinesses, he was an exponent of the ‘identification game’: The supposed ability of homosexuals to recognise one another at a glance was a challenge to medical science. Doctors prided themselves on their ability to ...”

“... portray the 20th century as a time of darkness, in which gay men struggled to escape the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment; Queer London complicates that account. Houlbrook’s history is lucid, subtle and at times very funny. Queer London is a confident book. It is also a confident queer history. While London has always been a magnet for queer ...”

“... absolutely 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 ...”

“... development of all. This is the way he converts an essentially aristocratic ethic into communism. Oscar Wilde would do much the same in his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, in which layabouts like himself who don’t have to work anticipate a socialist order in which this will be true of everybody. In his belief that the political goal is to ...”

“... mischievously revives. Nor is Swift the only Anglo-Irishman to dream of wiping out the underclass. Oscar Wilde poured scorn on sentimental do-gooders who ‘try to solve the problem of poverty … by keeping the poor alive’, while Bernard Shaw declared that he hated the poor and looked forward eagerly to their extermination. All this, as they say ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it is scathing I cannot tell.) Last year, when Orbis produced their visually excellent Annotated Oscar Wilde,* Wilde’s reference (in his essay on Thomas Griffiths Wainewright) to presumably Hellenistic statues of hermaphrodites ‘that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre’ was given the hilariously wrong ...”

“... found hints for it, at least as a verbal device, in some of his contemporaries. It is important in Wilde; and it is the unobtrusive source of some good jokes in Pinero – as when Lady Twomley, in The Cabinet Minister, tells her daughter, ‘Imogen, there is nothing for you but this marriage or contemptible, cleanly poverty,’ or when the apopleptic colonel ...”

“... doubt how and when the fatal blow was struck. In his memoirs, he noted that ‘the condemnation of Wilde had brought ruin upon a whole movement in art and letters.’ Yeats himself was fortunate that the Celtic Revival, which ran in close tandem with Decadence, had special resources of its own. Two of the great iconic victims of the social purity movement, the ...”

“... and absorbing art. ‘In the Arena chapel I stood stunned as the drama unfolded all around me ... Oscar Wilde had once stood in the same chapel. He, too, had been impressed.’ Still, Cambridge continued to have its points. At the Mill I stood communicating with the ducks. The river was already closed down for the winter. Raindrops prickled on the dark ...”

“... that stood him in good stead for a lifetime. He could not, however, overcome a distaste for Oscar Wilde Vincent, with apparent seriousness, goes so far as to see Crawford as ‘a central figure in the official world of art and culture in the broadest sense between the wars’, which may say more about the times than about the man. There can be no ...”

“... two-page 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 ...”

“... by a 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 ...”