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“... Oscar wilde is one of literature’s most bankable brand-names. As the illustrations in Merlin Holland’s The Wilde Album demonstrate, this was as true in his fin de siècle as in ours. During Wilde’s lifetime, his celebrity was used to sell Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, Madame Fontaine’s Bosom Beautifier, Straiton and Storm’s cigars and, lastly and mostignominiously, copies of the Illustrated Police Budget ...”

“... In the spring of 1882, Oscar Wilde travelled to a huge mining town in the Rocky Mountains called Leadville, where he lectured the miners on the ‘secret of Botticelli’. A fortnight later, he gave a lecture at the State University of Nebraska. Afterwards the students took him out to the State penitentiary where he saw: Poor odd types of humanity in hideous striped dresses making bricks in the sun, and all mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face ...”

“... that promotes the showing of art in odd and unexpected places. I had agreed to be locked in Oscar Wilde’s cell, the cell known as C.3.3, on the third floor of Block C, for an entire Sunday afternoon, to read an almost complete version of his De Profundis, which would take five and a half hours. It would be streamed onto a screen in the prison ...”

“... know would know enough already. Others assumed that a lacuna would be explicit of indecency: ‘“Oscar Wilde posing as —”’ was how the Marquess’s offending calling-card appeared in the Evening Standard. Lord Queensberry’s ‘Somdomite’ was displaying his characteristic ineffability by causing the tongue to stumble and producing gaps in ...”

“... in achievement, who relied upon ferocity rather than feeling. Without the light which the falling Oscar distributed upon them, they would have remained in obscurity. Brian Roberts may well have stumbled upon them by accident. Four of his previous biographies have been set, wholly or partly, in Africa; perhaps it was while he was examining the records of ...”

“... It’s hard to believe, but people were taking it in turns to recite Swinburne. Philip Hoare’s Wilde’s Last Stand is concerned with a more energetic strain of hedonism. By the end of 1915 it was estimated that there were 150 nightclubs in Soho alone: haunts such as the Cave of the Golden Calf, where aristocratic bohemians like Diana Manners and her ...”

“... The first two months of 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love ...”

“... In 1895, at a café in Algiers, Oscar Wilde procured a young Arab musician for André Gide, and thereby launched the French writer into a new life. It probably wasn’t Gide’s first homosexual experience, but it was the one he credited in his journals with the initiation into his real sexual nature, the moment, he recalled, in which he began ‘to discover myself – and in myself the tables of a new law ...”

“... because he does not feature in the standard martyrology of Irish nationalism. He is, of course, Oscar Wilde. By the time this satirical scene occurs, two-thirds of the way through At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O’Neill’s novel of the Easter Rising, the reader has already been forced to make some major adjustments to the canonical definitions of Irish ...”

“... In May 1895, the day before Oscar Wilde’s trial began, W.B. Yeats called at Wilde’s mother’s house in London to express his solidarity and that of ‘some of our Dublin literary men’ with the family. He later wrote of ‘the Britisher’s jealousy of art and artists, which is generally dormant but called into activity when the artist has gone outside his field into publicity of an undesirable kind ...”

“... of pith and wisdom. But Nietzsche (29 quotations in the Yale v. 15 in the 2014 Oxford) and Oscar Wilde (123 in the Yale v. 61 in the 2014 Oxford) influenced the way people who wanted to be seen to sparkle spoke and wrote. They also influenced what collectors of quotations regarded as the criteria of quotability. ...”

“... or wish we knew better, agents of prodigious but incomplete hauntings. From The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde to Chatterton, Ackroyd has shown himself an adept in the speech of such ghosts. Indeed his gift for their speech is so great that it can be distracting: we forget to wonder if the ghosts have anything to say. They do have things to ...”

“... tolerably sure that he would reply, ‘To have tried everything once,’ and then make one of his Oscar Wilde gestures. But to be familiar with him, and with his library and his circle and his anecdotes, was to see how apt was Murray Kempton’s description of Grand Street as a magazine arranged like a dinner party – a dinner party, moreover, that has ...”

“... and Charles Dickens (gathered in Chapter Two under the heading ‘Institutional America’), Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke (‘Aesthetic America’), Kipling and R.L. Stevenson (‘Epic (and Chivalric) America’), H.G. Wells (‘Futuristic America’), D.H. Lawrence (‘Primitive America’), W.H. Auden (‘Theological America’), Aldous Huxley ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst is better at bees than Oscar Wilde. On the opening page of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde has them ‘shouldering their way through the long un-mown grass’. A bee must never be allowed to ‘shoulder’. Later that afternoon, Dorian Gray, alarmed by Lord Henry Wotton’s graphic talk of youth’s inevitable degeneration, drops a lilac blossom that he has been ‘feverishly’ sniffing ...”