Stephen Fry

He's then arrested and servants from the Savoy Hotel.

testify they found things on the bed sheets when he had spent time there with youths.

And Richard Doily Cart, from his profits from Patience and other things, built the Savoy Hotel and got Escoffier, the great chef, and made it the finest hotel in Europe.

And Wilde would stay there a lot.

So there is a kind of weird circularity.

So when I hear that song, I think, how peculiar, isn't it?

And in a sense, this is what Wilde speculates about in De Profundis, that the life of pleasure does lead to something profoundly to do with sorrow, squalor, and misery.

And until you've come to terms with that and hit the bottom, you will never achieve any kind of stasis or happiness.

He's clever, he's unmanly, he's unhealthy.

There's something wrong.

I was about 16, I think.

I'd loved Oscar Wilde for six or seven years and had slowly begun to engage with his more difficult writing for a child.

The Soul of Man, you mentioned, The Soul of Man Under Socialism is the full title, which sounds like a very heavy political essay, but it's utterly brilliant.

It really is a remarkable piece of writing.

And we could do well to read it now.

It speaks so much towards politics and thought.

I grew up in the country and my parents were not particularly enamoured of television.

We had one.

It was a small thing, about the size of a large coffee mug.

And it lived in a cupboard.