Wilde Behaviour Has Tragic Results; Bosie - A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas. by Douglas Murray (Hodder & Stoughton Pounds 20). Reviewed by Richard Edmonds

Edmonds, Richard, The Birmingham Post (England)

Lord Alfred Douglas - otherwise known as Bosie - was the youth who brought about the downfall of Oscar Wilde.

In his heyday Bosie was famous as the most beautiful undergraduate in Oxford. He had golden hair and rather calculating eyes and it is difficult to believe when you look at him in his student days, that he contained within him the seeds which flowered into a personality that left him as one of the most notorious figures in literary history.

But in this fascinating and long awaited biography of Bosie, Douglas Murray sorts out the contradictions, the facts and the fictions which have always enveloped Wilde's lover, and in the process has come up with a fine study of a man who was at once bewitching and frighteningly manipulative.

Bosie left Oxford at the end of the summer term, 1893, having done little to avoid academic catastrophe. He left without a degree but the university authorities offered to allow him to sit a private examination. Bosie declined. The distractions were …

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Publication information: Article title: Wilde Behaviour Has Tragic Results; Bosie - A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas. by Douglas Murray (Hodder & Stoughton Pounds 20). Reviewed by Richard Edmonds. Contributors: Edmonds, Richard - Author. Newspaper title: The Birmingham Post (England). Publication date: August 5, 2000. Page number: 61. © 2009 Birmingham Post & Mail Ltd. COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group.

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