Wilde ponders, adding, "Anyhow, trust the English to carry class distinctions into their geography".

Other boys and bedmates follow as Wilde's fame furnishes genius with its false sense of immunity from prosecution. Though the screen may now show virtually any sexual coupling imaginable, normal or not, the film is discreet in depicting the Victorian underworld, its male brothels, transvestites, rent boys and ubiquitous blackmailers whose extortionate reach extended right up to the Foreign Secretary of the day, Lord Rosebery.

With the entrance of "Bosie" Douglas, the main theme emerges - entrapment, rather than enticement. This spoilt, vain, vindictive sprig of hankered aristocracy, nearly 20 years younger than Wilde, uses their scandalous relationship as the battleground on which to defy his e charged with succumbing to a new one - the vice of political correctness.

But at first viewing, Wilde is an impressive and touching work of intelligence, compassion and tragic stature. If its not quite as overwhelming and moving as one may have hoped, that's understandable. The war on this battlefield has largely been won, legally anyhow, and contention has moved on from the persecution of queers to less brutal social issues such as same-sex "marriages" and "adoptions".

In 1958, the then film censor, John Trevelyan, declared that "the homosexual theme" should be banned from British cinemas "until it becomes one that can be mentioned without offence".

Change has taken its time, out it has made the Wilde tragedy feel like past, not living history. What remains is the pain of seeing a great artist pulled down to dreadful humiliation and obloquy. Fry's final scenes are short but powerful. They show a broken man, his limbs stiff from the prison treadmill, his nails cracked and blackened from menial labour, his formerly soft aesthete's features now blocked and squared by his jail-bird haircut, and with calluses on his lips instead of bons mots.

One Anglo-Irish martyr to English prejudice may not exactly equate with the great Irish famine. Still, it might be a nice idea if Tony Blair made an apology for what was done to Oscar in 1895.