Bookworm: Oscar party

Published on 27/10/2012 00:00

Had he lived, Oscar Wilde would have been 158 on Thursday, and to mark the occasion Gyles Brandreth threw one of year’s best parties in his honour – and to celebrate the publication of Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol (see our front page interview).

Guests of honour at London’s Cadogan Hotel, where Wilde was arrested in 1895, were his only living descendants – his grandson Merlin Holland and great-grandson Lucien Holland. They were joined by a range of contemporary equivalents of people who figured in Wilde’s life in the 1890s, including leading playwrights and actors, a former Home Secretary, MPs, prison officers from Reading Gaol and the rector of the church where Wilde was married. The guests included actors who have played Wilde on stage and screen – among them Sir Donald Sinden and Stephen Fry – as well as noted admirers of Wilde, including Barry Humphries, Alistair McGowan, Peter Bowles and Sir David Hare.

Part of the Cadogan was once home to Wilde’s friend, the celebrated beauty Lillie Langtry, so Brandreth invited his friend Joanna Lumley as her nearest contemporary equivalent, along with other actresses who have also appeared in Wilde’s plays. They included Dame Eileen Atkins, Jane Asher, Lynda Bellingham and Jemma Redgrave – whose grandfather Michael Redrave was in the first film version of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Former Home Secretary Michael Howard, Nicholas Parsons, Anneka Rice, Nick Hewer and Hugh Bonneville were also among the guests to raise a glass to Brandreth’s toast to Wilde, before Merlin Holland read John Betjeman’s poem “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel”.

DETECTRIX AND TREAT

It’s hard enough keeping pace with Alexander McCall Smith’s prolific output of novels, but the number for which he writes introductions is even greater: next month, for example, he has written ones for Angela Thirkell’s Wild Strawberries and High Rising (Virago). But the one he has just provided for Andrew Forrester’s 1864-set novel The Female Detective, just published by the British Library, must have been irresistible to him – as its eponymous heroine, “Miss Gladden”, is the first professional female detective in British fiction. In other words, the real No 1 Lady Detective.