Oscar Wilde's Last Stand Quotes

“On the other side is chaos, libertinism, vice, danger and the unknown. And the unknown will always remain so to those who do not choose to explore it.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“The fear of decadence is the fear – and fascination – of the other. It is a fantasy fear of letting go, of the abandonment of principle. In that it is an essentially middle-class fear, for the upper classes with their privilege – literally, private law – were answerable to no one, while the working class were both expendable and by tradition prone to vice”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Rather than creating a pure Reich out of a Weimar Germany almost glorifying in its hedonistic allure, the Nazi hierarchy would exhibit every symptom of decadence. When the drug-addicted Goering was arrested in 1945, his fingernails were varnished red; on being strip-searched, it was discovered his toenails were painted, too.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“this post-trial assessment by Lord Buckmaster: The licence was accordingly refused but the refusal was not due to an adverse judgement of the play. It may be hoped that the trial of the criminal proceedings is now forgotten and the only question is on what grounds found in the play itself can it be regarded as unfit for performance.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“the refusal of a licence – the banning of Salome – was entirely due to Billing’s antics, and not to any serious objection by the Lord Chamberlain;”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Hugh Walpole met him at Marie Stopes’s house in Norbury: ‘something of a shock. How astonished was I when this rather bent, crooked-bodied, hideous old man came into the room. How could he ever have been beautiful, for he has a nose as ugly as Cyrano’s with a dead-white bulbous end?’ Douglas talked nonstop, in a shrill voice. ‘When someone he hates like Wells is mentioned, he gets so angry that all his crooked features light up and his nose achieves a sort of sombre glow”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Indeed, the suffragette movement and its link to fascism represented one kind of genteel revolt by spirited upper-middle-class woman against the stultifying effects of the Victorian ethic of limiting the role of respectable ladies to ornaments in the social round.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“still regarded as highly eccentric outside reactionary conservative and fascist circles,’ notes Richard Thurlow, ‘it is interesting to note that some historians now argue that secret societies like the IRA and the Mafia have indeed played a significant role in world events …”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“The emergent post-war fascist groups all believed in the Protocols: British intelligence reports noted that their meetings heard audience remarks such as ‘Kill the Jews’, ‘Perish Judea’, ‘We hate them’, and ‘Bastards’.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“The absence of war did not mean that the vacuum would necessarily be replaced by peace. In the no man’s land between Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, Europe revolted and Britain faced chaos as the civil unrest of wartime spread.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“1917 (or possibly 1918) poem, ‘Greater Love’: ‘Red lips are not so red/ As the stained stones kissed by the English dead”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Billing was at Tower Hill, addressing the 12,000 police who had called a general strike (‘Traffic Managing Itself’ headlined The Times, noting that at least the reprehensible strikers had agreed to work in the event of an air raid)”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“If true, this meant Billing was guilty, if not of treason, then certainly insurrection. In a world worried by revolution and the rise of the radical right, he was a dangerous man.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“On the fourth anniversary of the war, peace seemed further away than ever. The military conspirators, and Billing, their pawn, had achieved their aims.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Society before the war showed signs of becoming what French sociey before the Revolution had been – curious, gay, tolerant, reckless and reasonably cynical. After the war I suppose it will be none of these things … The war has ruined our little patch of civility as thoroughly as a revolution could have done.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue,’ wrote Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“An exaggerated clitoris might even drive a woman to an elephant.’ This remark – unprecedented in the courts of British justice – elicited loud laughter.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“It is extraordinary that among these learned and professional men, only a deluded lunatic appears to have known the meaning of the word, and that from reading – or being told about – the work of a German sexologist. It is, perhaps, indicative of the general ignorance of sex (and, indeed, of the lower status of women),”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Billing’s apparent defence of Christian values and Messianic pose brought him the bizarre support of the Christian Scientists, who had decided that he was ‘the Saviour, Christ the King, come to redeem them in this moment of national peril”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“The Manchester Guardian noted: ‘People do not understand this legalistic attitude to affairs of life and death.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“They toured India, after calls for Maud to be banned from performing there; imperial values imagined that Maud’s erotic dance would excite the ‘rich native’ to an unsafe degree,”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“William Leonard Courtney (then sixty-one-year-old theatre and literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, he had been an Oxford professor of philosophy until forced to resign when his homosexuality became public knowledge)”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“For the next twenty years she would tour the world in search of artistic recognition, a futile quest, ‘because she mistook her indisputable uniqueness for greatness”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Weininger’s theory is that women cannot love … have made no ideal of man to correspond with the male conception of the Madonna … The German conception of women is lower than that of the Zulus in Tschaaka’s day’, he summarised, conflating racism and xenophobia for readers whose knowledge of South Africa was defined by reports of the British victory in the Anglo-Boer War.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“wrote White, expressing the firm belief that ‘England will best Germany because Germany is wicked, and the English, if not salt of the earth, are “good” men”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“editor of the English Review and accomplished nationalist – was then aged seventy, an ‘international expert on anti-semitism”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Smallwood the Coalition candidate was returned; and the Imperialist of 27 October offered a £500 reward ‘to any person furnishing evidence to support a successful petition under “The Corrupt Practices Act”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Alfred Baker, Town Clerk of Hertford and Treasurer of the Society of Vigilantes. Their campaign slogan ran: HINDER THE HUNS PARALYSE PROFITEERS PURIFY POLITICS WIN THE WAR”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“what sort of mothers can these girls have? The answer would supply an explanation of, but no excuse for, our national decadence and degradation”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“If all the smart restaurants were closed down, the ‘flapper’ trade would probably close down also, and the flappers, disdaining the more humble eating-houses they were wont to frequent, may even return to their homes, which they left to imperil, if not to sacrifice, their chastity.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century