A new kind of biography: What the books Wilde kept say about him

“Oscar Wilde devoured and luxuriated in books. When he was sick and when the prison doors were closed upon him, books were the first things he asked for.He turned to them, too, as he crawled towards death in his final years, for comfort and consolation …"

Sometimes an individual is such a pain that, even when he’s dead, people go out of their way to get back at him. Like the gravediggers responsible for burying John Douglas. He left instructions that he was to be buried standing upright. The lads interred him head down. Even in death, they wanted to stick it to him.

Douglas, the man responsible for boxing’s Queensberry Rules, was the 9th Marquess of Queensberry. Or maybe the 8th.