Andy Miller

I think he comes back to the kind of letter towards the end.

And so it's sort of, it's topped and tailed as a letter.

But in the middle, you have, I think, one of the most, I mean, it's one of the great, I think, reflections on the function of religion in a secular age.

He isn't religious.

He converts, we think, at the end, but does he really?

To please Robbie, probably.

But really, this is radical.

Taking up all of that kind of... He'd read Renown's Life of Christ.

He'd taken on board all the biblical scholarship of the 19th century.

And his vision of Christ is, I would contest, the vision of Christ that most people who have a relationship with Christianity without being believers...

I mean, he did it first and he did it better.

I've weirdly just read over Easter weekend or reread Emmanuel Carrère's The Kingdom, which is, again, an interesting 20th century version of a difficult human being dealing and grappling with the Gospels and going back to original text.

And I thought, reading that back to back with this, I thought Wilde was doing something so...

I mean, he was writing a letter in prison under the worst possible circumstances, but finding a way of being genuinely adding to our understanding of religion, genuinely adding to our sense of what it's possible for words to do.

When the review in Vanity Fair by Max Bierbaum calls it the Lord of Language, which is a phrase that he uses about himself.

So is it a letter?

Well, it was a letter not to send.

There is that horrible moment when Oscar is writing.

He's released and he's writing against the advice of everybody to Bosie.

And Bosie's warm response to him makes him think he's read my letter and understood it.