“Passers-by in Sloane Street last night might have imagined that a film-shoot was taking place, as an open carriage, drawn by a magnificent pair of horses and bearing a solitary, diminutive figure in full Victorian black mourning dress, drew up outside the Cadogan Hotel. This was in fact the cultural critic Julia Wood, arriving for the launch of her first book, The Resurrection of Oscar Wilde: A Cultural Afterlife (The Lutterworth Press, £15). The hotel was the place where Wilde was arrested in 1895, an event commemorated in a poem by John Betjamen, which is frequently intoned by members of the Oscar Wilde Society, who were out in force at last night’s event.”

Jonathan Fryer