Tony McKinstry reviews a new biography of Oscar Wilde's lover, Bosie.

Bosie, A Biography Of Lord Alfred Douglas, Douglas Murray, Hodder & Stoughton, £20.

ONE hundred years after the death of playwright, wit and raconteur Oscar Wilde comes this tour-de-force biography of his lover, the man pivotal to his downfall. Wilde's love for Lord Alfred Douglas, son of The Marquess of Queensberry - the Black Douglas - was "the love that dare not speak its name".

Wilde and Bosie's homosexual relationship and society's hypocritical abomination of it in the late 19th century landed Wilde in jail and Lord Alfred in self-imposed exile abroad as the scandal raged.

Bosie, a family nickname from 'boysie', has always been portrayed as a privileged, petulant wastrel who sponged on Wilde's towering talent and wallet.

He was and he did, but according to biographer Murray, who amazingly began writing this as a 16-year-old after winning a school prize for an essay on Wilde, he had many other facets to his nature and he was generous to Oscar after his release from Reading jail.

After Wilde's death and the subsequent lies and back-stabbing of so-called friends of both men, Bosie became one of this country's finest sonneteers.

Many of his classically-crafted sonnets are featured in this enthralling biography.

Bosie, like his father, had serious character defects including a death-wish-like propensity for litigation while railing against his king and Prime Minister Asquith and, later, Winston Churchill.

After his marriage to the androgynous Olive Custance, like the Catholic convert that he was, he fulminated against homosexuality with all his undoubted skill as a writer.

But he was still a social pariah. And that is the way it stayed until he died on March 20, 1945 after existing, virtually destitute, in a tiny flat on the south coast, living off a small allowance from his estranged wife and handouts from friends.

Douglas Murray, who took four years to research this book, got permission from Home Secretary Jack Straw to see the official file on the 'Wilde Scandal' which was to be sealed until 2043.

He has captured the soul of a man with a monumental talent for tragedy. This is social history, art and politics rolled in to one.

Wilde himself summed up Bosie - "the slim gilt soul that walked between passion and poetry".

At the height of Oscar's fame he also could have been describing Lord Alfred when he quipped: "The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves".