2min chapter

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Cultural Favourites from the Archives – Letters That Changed The World

Intelligence Squared

CHAPTER

Lenin's Letters to Oscar Wilde

The letters that brought Oscar Wilde to his downfall. It's just a heartbreaking thing that there's a very unjust law against homosexuality. Destroyed this man, and this sentence of castration by chemical treatment was just appalling. Beyond medieval torture, really, and it literally destroyed him as a man. And I think one of the things that is so moving about that, for me reading it, is that there are lots of letters in the book where you are aware that history is being made.

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