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Monsieur Jullian as seen on the back cover of Dreamers of Decadence (1971). Here at last is the long-promised (and long!) piece about the life and work of Philippe Jullian (1919–1977), a French writer and illustrator who’s become something of a cult figure of mine in recent years. Why the fascination? First and foremost because [...]

Bibliothèque Libertine edition (1996). The quintessence of bliss can, therefore, only be enjoyed by beings of the same sex… Teleny More Wildeana, and yes, it’s that painting again… Teleny is an authorless and explicitly homoerotic novel often attributed to Oscar Wilde although what evidence there is regarding its creation points to it being the work [...]

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907). I finished reading Neil McKenna’s excellent biography recently, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, a book which makes an ideal companion to Richard Ellmann’s 1987 life of Wilde. Whilst reading about the two trials I remembered that among five pages of digitised Wilde volumes at the Internet Archive there’s [...]

A set of playing cards created in 1986 by artist Rosita Fanto in association with Wilde biographer Richard Ellmann. Out of print now as these things usually are but this card trading site has more views of the cards, as does this page. Fanto and Ellmann also created a card set based on James Joyce’s [...]