Oscar Wilde denounced as the devil by his lover

[T_i_B]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=4H1C2Y21EVEB3QFIQMFCM5OAVCBQYJVC?xml=/news/2004/10/04/nwilde04.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/10/04/ixportal.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=97597

A book by Lord Alfred Douglas demonising Oscar Wilde, his former lover, that was never published because it also libelled the Prime Minister of the day will be sold at auction this month. Lord Douglas mounted a ferocious attack on the writer and others in a book called The Wilde Myth, but the printers and intended publishers regarded it as so incendiary that they even broke up the type used to produce proof copies.

Only two proofs are known to have survived, one of which, bearing Lord Douglas's final handwritten corrections and an inscription from the publisher Martin Secker, is expected to fetch £40,000 to £50,000 at Sotheby's in London on Oct 29.

"Wilde was not a great artist, he was a small one," wrote Lord Douglas, who had by then become a Roman Catholic. "He acquired by practice the faculty of writing the sort of stuff that appeals to and tickles the minds of small people.

"He was one of the most powerful forces for evil that has happened in Europe for the last 300 years. I do not know of any man who more truly and literally sold himself to the devil than he did."

[DS1]

1. Yeah, I've heard one that before

but I don't think it was meant in a negative sense :evilgrin: