Andy Miller

Is it a book that you find, as it were, de profundis in your life that you've found helpful?

Yes, yes.

The governor, the second... What's the name of the second Reading governor?

Major Nelson Young.

Major Nelson told Robbie Ross, he said to him, he's got two years.

And the fact that the boy lived three and a half... The treadmill was equivalent to climbing Ben Nevis twice in a day.

Just horrible.

This is the current caretaker, Sandy Frow, of Reading Jail, recorded in...

Wilde's cell, talking to Neil Bartlett about the conditions in Reading Jail at the time Wilde was composing the prison manuscript.

I wanted to just keep that fresh in people's minds while we ask you to read to us, because we talked about... It's fascinating, this with Wilde.

Such is Wilde's genius and reputation for genius...

that I find the experience when reading De Profundis is I'm going along quite nicely and I'm thinking, oh, that's very good.

And every so often I think, and you wrote this by gaslight on whatever paper you could get under tremendous... I mean, it actually does really defy belief that under those circumstances you could produce something like this.

In the manuscript, just the next line in the manuscript, what you were saying there, Stephen, there is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.

Just as there is only one thing for you, meaning Bosie, absolute humility also, you had better come down into the dust and learn it beside me.

Yes.

That's beautiful.

Isn't it?

And the phrase that I've underlined, the spendthrift of my own genius.

Yeah.