The Man in the Red Coat

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on coloured canvas, reveals himself.

It is a moment when a shift in the nature of literary fame occurs. Previously, a famous writer was a writer who became famous by writing. Wilde pioneered the idea of becoming famous first, and then getting down to the writing. By the end of 1882 he was “still” only a minor poet and diligent lecturer. But he was also famous on two continents and therefore primed for a literary career.

Frenchly, they set off with 1,300 litres of claret, fifty bottles of Pernod, and a mechanical piano.

Wilde also established another prime rule of fame in the modern age: that there is no such thing as bad publicity, there is only publicity. Success is better measured in column inches than by what those columns contain.

the novel has almost as many forms as there are forms of love and sex.

The past is the present's toy and plaything, gratifyingly unable to answer back.

His grandfather had white peacocks roosting in a catalpa tree.

The main reason Britons sought exile in France was to escape scandal (and be able to carry on in their scandalous ways): it was the place to go for the upper-class bankrupt, bigamist, cardsharp and homosexual. They sent us their ousted leaders and dangerous revolutionaries; we sent them our posh riff-raff. Another reason for continental exile was expressed by the painter Walter Sickert in a letter from Dieppe in 1900: 'It is bloody healthy here & fucking cheap ("Fucking" used here as an adverb, not a substantive gerund).

The French had the more pragmatic approach: you married for social position, for money or property, for the perpetuation of family, but not for love. Love rarely survived marriage, and it was a foolish hypocrisy to pretend that it might.