Andy Miller

You know, the fact that he's, you know, he knows he's disgraced.

He knows he's going to have to leave.

He wants to leave England.

He's sick of England.

But the slow kind of descent into that terrible death in a cheap hotel in Paris, sort of drunken,

And he's squandered many of his closest friendships by this point as well.

It's almost unbearable to read.

And found the language to express it.

Well, that's the thing.

The story you've just told, of course, also prefigures De Profundis.

It's a pearl retrieved from the dead.

And the fact that, as John said, he kind of defaults on his intentions, as stated in the essay, in the letter.

That matters and it doesn't matter.

The capturing, as I say, what I find so incredible about De Profundis is fixing something that isn't fixed.

The flow of intellectual and emotional thought and how those two things relate to one another.

Extraordinary, really.

This is Tom Stoppard speaking in a documentary, an omnibus documentary from the 90s, Stephen, in which you took part as well.

This is Stoppard on Wilde's downfall.

You're nodding furiously.

I think that's so true.