There is so much more in me, and I always was a good father to both my children.”

A century after his release, Britain is going wild for Wilde. His comedies, such as The Importance of Being Earnest, (which he described as “exquisitely trivial”) and Lady Windermere’s Fan have enjoyed a consistent popularity in repertory theatres around the country, and in the next few months his personality and cultural impact will be explored in a West End play, two screen versions and a new biography.
The film Wilde, due out in the autumn and starring actor and author Stephen Fry, intends to balance his homosexuality, for which he was imprisoned, with his love for his wife, Constance, and two sons.The producers, brothers Marc and Peter Samuelson, said they felt that the Victorian writer’s scandalous affair with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, which led to his downfall, painted an “incomplete” picture of the man.Directed by Brian Gilbert, the film focuses on 15 years of Wilde’s life, when most of his great works, including The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, were written. The script is adapted from Richard Ellmann’s definitive biography, and Vanessa Redgrave plays Wilde’s mother.Only now, says Fry, is his subject receiving the universal respect that is his due. “He stands for all people who refused to freeze themselves into a moral code,” he said on BBC Radio yesterday.Because of today’s more liberal attitudes, the film is likely to be more sexually explicit than previous studies, which could not focus enough on homosexuality, and instead merely alluded to sexual practices which Wilde himself called “feasting with panthers”.The actor Simon Callow has been winning rave reviews for The Importance of Being Oscar, a one-man show at the Savoy Theatre which opened last week, in which he attempts to humanise, rather than eulogise the playwright.”Wilde constructed a personality for himself, believing that on it depended his value as an artist,” Callow has said “By personality he didn’t mean in the corrupted sense … but the inner life transformed into the outer self.”Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, has given the show his enthusiastic backing. He himself is working on a new book about his ancestor’s life, and he said yesterday: “The British public are happy enough to read his children’s stories to their children, or clap at revivals of The Importance of Being Earnest, but his private life you just didn’t ask about.”To find now that it’s all been brought back together and the whole man is there is delightful. I’m very happy about that.”Also in progress is a film version of Wilde’s play The Ideal Husband, which is about a cabinet minister revered by all women as being the ideal man, yet who hides his corruption behind a facade.Wilde himself had already won a kind of establishment acceptance.

In 1995, he was finally be given the stamp of approval with an inscription on a new stained-glass window at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Even the present Marquess of Queensberry, descendant of the man who put Wilde behind bars for sodomy, was reported to have joined the Oscar Wilde Society.But Professor Alan Sinfield, author of The Wilde Century, says that the image of Wilde, as a consequence of the trials, set up the notion of the queer man of the 20th century.”I thought at the time there’s always been two Oscar Wildes – one that’s a synonym for queerness and the one that’s at the Haymarket with all sorts of knights and ladies.” Until recently, he said, it was quite difficult to marry the two together.The fact that the newest productions were doing so could signify an increasingly enlightened attitude towards homosexuality – or “a technique for putting homosexuality back into a box, by saying we recognise that, enough of it, now we’ll get to the full man”, Professor Sinfield said.. Hundreds of new assisted places in private preparatory schools could be thrown into jeopardy because of a civil service freeze on processing them during the election period, independent schools warned yesterday. The fate of more than 600 places for bright children from low-income families in 118 prep schools joining the scheme this year will be uncertain under a Labour government, even though the party has agreed to honour places already offered if it wins power, the schools said.
Some said they were now unlikely to wait for an end to the confusion and would offer the places to paying families instead.The difficulty rests on the fact that prep schools new to the assisted places scheme have been forbidden to make any firm offers of places until they receive signed “participation agreements” from the Department for Education and Employment.The deadline for providing the department with information for the agreements fell yesterday, by which time all processing of the scheme had been suspended for the duration of the election campaign.Schools will now have to wait until after 1 May to make formal offers of places. They will also have to wait to see whether, if Labour wins, the new government will honour the offers.Moves to extend the assisted places scheme were included in the Education Bill, which was rushed through Parliament last week to beat the election deadline.In a series of deals between the parties over clauses in the Bill, Labour said children who had accepted offers by 1 May would be allowed to take up their assisted places if it took power, though it remains committed to phasing out the scheme and using the money saved to cut class sizes.Private prep schools which have been allocated assisted places yesterday confirmed they had been told not to fill them without the formal agreement.Andrew Corbett, headmaster of Kings College School, Cambridge, predicted a new Labour government might argue that the school could not offer its allocated five places.He said: “Having publicly announced it was awarding these places, it now looks as if the DFEE are going to turn round and say they are not.

Parents have had their hopes built up, and we have to turn round and say no, unfortunately we can’t offer them.”George Marsh, headmaster of Dulwich College Preparatory School in south London, said May was likely to be too late to fill places for many schools, forcing them to give up their allocated assisted places.Labour yesterday confirmed “any places allocated to a specific individual children” by election day would be honoured.A party spokesman said the situation would be reviewed in the light of the freeze on agreements, but blamed government incompetence in pushing through the bill for creating the problem.The spokesman added: “They did not have the necessary commitment behind what they apparently regard as flagship proposals.”A spokeswoman for the education department said that all processing of participation agreements had been stopped until after the election in line with guidelines on dealing with long-term commitments during an election period.. Three Belfast Protestants involved in the horrific sectarian murder of a Catholic woman yesterday escaped life sentences when an appeal court overturned their convictions. The court struck out their murder convictions and instead gave them shorter sentences for lesser offences connected with the killing, which took place in 1992. Since the men have already served some years in prison, they are to be released next week.
The appeals of two other men against life sentences were dismissed.

All the appeals centred on the credibility of the chief prosecution witness, a 21-year-old woman who was present in the house where the victim was killed.The killing was characterised by a mixture of sectarian hatred, shocking violence and pathos. The woman who died was Anne Marie Smyth, a 26-year- old mother of two from the city of Armagh.Ms Smyth, who was described as a good-natured innocent abroad, was on her first trip to Belfast when she strayed into the company of extreme loyalists from east Belfast. When they discovered that she was a Catholic, she was lured to a house where she was strangled in a bedroom.Her body was then taken to waste ground, where her throat was cut back to the spine The only motive for the killing was religion. For a time after her body was found the case was regarded as a mystery.

But it gradually emerged that loyalists, some connected with the illegal Ulster Volunteer Force, had been responsible.Police sources say they believe up to a dozen were involved in the murder in various ways. Several women were among those who appeared in a long and complex court case. One of the men whose conviction was upheld yesterday, who was said to be the ringleader, was described as “a Catholic-hating UVF man” who headed the organisation in east Belfast. The trial judge recommended he serve at least 25 years.Ms Smyth’s father Frank has been left to raise her two children.