Extract

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

A portrait stands in a locked room, and the face within it rots. Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel gives ancient myth the texture of a London drawing room, tracing a beautiful young man who trades his soul for eternal youth and watches a painted canvas bear the record of every cruelty and indulgence his own features refuse to show. Lord Henry Wotton whispers his philosophy of sensation like a perfumed poison, and Dorian listens, and the world pays the price. Wilde wrote it in a fever, and it reads like one: gorgeous, unsettling, a parable dressed in the silks of aestheticism. Beneath its epigrammatic surface lies a genuinely frightening meditation on the cost of living without consequence, and the portrait that waits for all of us.