Dear readers of my blog,

writing up on ongoing football events, while professional obligations – picking up the loose threads at the end of the school year as well as awarding prizes or waiting for possible oral exams – concern certain administrative tasks – is not an easy job when the main topic is supposed to be Oscar Wilde. All the same, you can always try to think about the Irishman's work in terms of current events. On Whit Monday, for example, I tried to rethink the ending of my preface to the essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” in the sense of Irish history from Wilde's lifetime to the present day crisis. This is all the more useful as the current crisis of the United Kingdom touches both Ireland as a whole and the European Union. I like to play with figure, so that the very last sentence I noted runs as follows: “It is since 2016 at the very latest that the Irish know why they once joined the EU, and facing twenty-six other European states united behind the Republic of Ireland, British politicians should have learned by now that this situation is highly symbolic of what is going to happen sooner or later: the twenty-six counties of Ireland will one day be re-united!”