Stephen Fry

Even that play, because of his life, everything about him is, I wouldn't say tainted, is informed by, maybe has a halo or an unholy halo effect, as it were, of the terrible story of his downfall and the messianic nature of it, that he was a secular Bohemian Christ.

He had disciples, some of whom betrayed him, and he kind of rose again.

I mean, one of the things, you know, when I started becoming sort of vaguely well-known and being asked to go to universities and give talks or whatever, and I noticed that as in the 70s,

In the early 80s or mid 80s, people still on students in their walls, on their posters, they tended to have Jimi Hendrix and Karl Marx, John Lennon or whatever, because if the world was going to be put to rights, it would be put to right by rock and roll music or by, you know, revolutionary politics.

But as the period changed into the 90s, I noticed more and more often there would be posters of Einstein and Oscar.

Those two, you know, but the life of the mind, because pop music and revolutionary politics had been sort of exploded.

Somehow shown to be worthless by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the whole business of Russia.

Stadium rock.

Stadium rock and so on.

Whereas you could look into Einstein's eyes, and even if you didn't understand him,

word of his physics.

You could see the crinkly international humanitarian in there and sort of believe that this was someone who mattered.

And with Wilde, he was the student prince and is the student prince.

He is the prince of Bohemia.

And that's true around the world.

And I used to paint this image.

If you've ever been to New York City and you've got in a cab, one of those yellow cabs, and asked you to go down, say, to the village from Midtown, you'll be going probably down one of the down avenues, and the most obvious one is Fifth Avenue, a very famous avenue, and it goes downtown one way.

Bear with me.

This is relevant.

As you pass 33rd Street, there's a very famous building, which is the Empire State Building.