Stephen Fry

And, of course, there is behind it an echo of, I have come to this conclusion, Bosie, you must too.

Because, yeah, being careless of lives of others, even though he might be right to say that he was careless of the lives of others, nothing like as careless, as aristocratically careless as Bosie was.

Oscar was known for his kindness to people and his consideration and his...

It's so interesting that, isn't it?

There is something in his manner that, as you say, does allow one to feel sorry for him and not to think that it's just a showy peacock making grand claims for himself.

It's, I suppose, the fact that you trust his honesty.

You trust his vision and his understanding of things to be greater than just about anybody else you know.

I mean, underneath all that serene, swan-like...

was a very, very busy pair of feet paddling through the literature of the world.

He understood Russian and German literature and French literature and philosophy.

And he read constantly and remembered and quoted and thought hard.

And it didn't come that easily.

But he made it look as if it came easily, like a Ronnie O'Sullivan, if we're talking of geniuses.

He did.

Yeah, and of course, when he was in various places on the South Coast or in hotels or borrowed houses trying to write plays, Bosie was the one who was stopping him from working and plucking at him and pulling at him and stopping him from concentrating.

Yeah, it is.

And I think you're right about that point about Christ and the imagination being a form of love.

And one of the most remarkable things about Wilde is that even in the height of his apparently profligate days, when he was beginning to see Bosie and rarely saw his children or his wife, except occasionally to read them stories, which he then put into a book, The House of Pomegranates, and had those wonderful fairy stories, The Young King and The Happy Prince and so on.

Even at that time, those stories show that he had an awareness of precisely

what was going to happen to him.