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“... 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 ...”

“... like to be, and as such they evoke a mixture of derision and admiration. From Oliver Goldsmith and Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw, Brendan Behan and Graham Norton, John Bull’s other island has furnished the British with a series of talented court jesters, praised and patronised in equal measure. Ireland was burdened with the task of writing much of ...”

“... at the trial of the Tichborne Claimant, and of the great day when he succeeded in putting down Oscar Wilde in conversation. James, as he was named at his birth in 1912, was impressed and remained influenced for the rest of his life by this elegantly remote and unfulfilled man. By the age of 16, when the family was living in the South of France, he had ...”

“... and neither, as a rule, do we believe them about celebrities. We believe from reading him that Oscar Wilde – in person – was both superficial and profound. Or we believe that Roland Barthes in person – after publishing The Fashion System – was both structuralist and poststructuralist. And yet while Barthes himself, correctly, found that ...”

“... privileged social groups – in effect, the licence of the lawless aristocrat. From Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde, the aristocrat and the anarchist have always been secret bedfellows. If the English love a character, they also love a lord, which is one reason Byron (who was literally an aristocrat) and Wilde (who was ...”

“... Hérodias – everything connects to everything in this book). Across the page is a photograph of Oscar Wilde, Byronic in traditional Greek Evzone garb. Wilde makes multiple appearances in the book as a shadow analogue to the French principals. He and Montesquiou were both associated with sunflowers, for example; both ...”

“... Campbell’s) were expatriates: for the most part, American, Irish and Scottish. Oscar Wilde memorably said that when Americans die, the good ones go to Paris. It is interesting to speculate what he would have made of the bunch that in the Forties and Fifties preempted their posthumous just deserts. Who they were and what they did is ...”

“... are a kind of parody of Bill Haley and the Comets (so were Bill Haley and the Comets, as Oscar Wilde might have said)’ – that I looked for a more respectable cause. I think it’s in his formal criticism. In Working with Structuralism (1981) and The Modes of Modern Writing (1977) Lodge worked mainly with the version of Structuralism which he ...”

“... these primary facts, even although my work has been held to be so infinitely inferior to that of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and others? Public as he is, Haggard seems to occupy an intellectual and imaginative backwater (the Athenaeum?) where the poems of Sassoon never circulate and Massingham’s Nation is never found on the library table. Two years ...”

“... so is the recognition (something he handed on to Menander, and Menander to Beaumarchais and Oscar Wilde); so is the rescue in the nick of time. But the rescue is abortive, the upshot grim. Unexpected. But then we might expect the unexpected from Euripides.Suppose, then, that the question is settled: we now know what happened in Euripides’s ...”

“... bibliomaniac and practising pederast who had compiled a monumental bibliography of Oscar Wilde’, the model for the flamboyant Mr Deacon? Probably. Is there a touch of Peter Quennell in the floppy-haired Mark Members? Is J.G. Quiggin really Cyril Connolly? And is Moreland Constant Lambert? Is Dr Trelawney ‘a projection’ of Aleister ...”

“... into coherence, if not into sense. There isn’t much she hasn’t read, or doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every ...”

“... Negative Space seems rather more conventional than the earlier books, from its epigraph from Oscar Wilde, to the 19-part persona poem about the Antarctic explorer Frank Wild, which just about anyone might have written, and isn’t a patch on W.S. Graham’s book Malcolm Mooney’s Land or Brodsky’s ‘A Polar Explorer’, to a standard-issue ...”

“... have? I’ll tell you what sort of wallpaper they have. They have wallpaper that would have killed Oscar Wilde more quickly. I presume he wanted to know how much money they had, because the poor have different emotions from the rich, even with their eyes closed. This is what the Tories have done to English literature. Wallpaper described is always ...”

“... in the south-east of Ireland where we lived, to perform his one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar. My uncle, who was a staunch member of Fianna Fáil, the ruling party, and a fervent member of the ruling church – he was later decorated by the Pope – bought us all tickets, and we attended, as did many others in the town, in a family ...”