‘There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him.’ – The Picture of Dorian Gray,… Read More »Dorian Orange
by Mark Simpson (The London Times, September 4 2009) “Are you tired of looking at me yet?” asks Ben Barnes as Dorian Gray in Oliver Parker’s new film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s only novel. Ostensibly he’s asking the question of his admirers, the cynical hedonist Lord Henry Wooton (Colin Firth)… Read More »Ours is the Dorian Gray Age
How a naughty new D&G ad sums up our self-regarding, clonosexual world (Arena Hommes Plus, Winter 2008, collected in Metrosexy) Most ads these days aren’t worth a first glance. But earlier this year D&G Time launched a heavily-rotated global campaign directed by Hype Williams that was definitely worth a second. If… Read More »Twinsome Devils and the Narcissus Complex
Oscar Wilde’s dramatic talents were no match for the blue-blooded battiness of the Douglases (Independent on Sunday, March 2002) There is a terrible, filthy vice which should strike horror and shame into the hearts of any red-blooded Englishman, and which is closely and intimately associated with an effete 19th-century Anglo-Irish… Read More »Revenge of the Psychocrumpet