Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas
Douglas Murray
Hodder, £20, 370pp
Buy it at BOL

There is something for everyone to despise in Lord Alfred Douglas: those who have no criticism of his promotional homosexuality or his later homophobia will find his anti-semitism disgusting; anyone who can stomach this must have a hard time with his cruel treatment of friends and family, his litigiousness and absurd posing over his third-rate poetry. He is chiefly memorable as a partner in one of the great doomed love affairs of literary history. Here he is often presented as the villain, but it was not, as Douglas Murray makes clear in this generous biography, a one-sided disaster, with Oscar Wilde the passive victim of a beautiful, cock-teasing brat.

Their affair was more evenly matched than that, and also grimly familiar. A glance at any newspaper's court reports shows that it is not at all uncommon for a couple to share a destructive love that ruins each other's happiness and that of their family and friends. History sides with Wilde because he was incomparably the better person and the better writer.

It was Douglas who was the sexual revolutionary of the pair; he was much more daring than Wilde, who was content to laugh secretly at contemporary society, sniggeringly inserting references to homosexual slang such as "Ernest" or "Bunburying" into his works - clues that the sexual underworld would recognise while the bourgeois public saw only the play.

Douglas, however, wanted to conceal nothing: he would not only be homosexual, he would spread the message of a better form of love. It was Douglas who wrote of "the Love that dare not speak its name" in an undergraduate magazine, and even after Wilde's imprisonment wrote: "I am proud that I have been loved by a great poet... sodomites, and I know a great many, are intellectually superior to other men." His public pronouncements and letters detailing how he had made love with this or that boy were to dog him in later life, when he developed a new persona as the scourge of all deviants, cursing former friends in public as "a bugger" or "a habitual sodomite".

His conversion followed the consummation of another interesting relationship, between Douglas and the bisexual poet Olive Custance, who was one of the few women to be associated with the decadents. He made his attraction to her quite clear: "You are a darling Baby and you are exactly like a boy and you know perfectly well that I love you better than anyone else, boy or girl."

After a few years of happiness, Olive and her family also became victims of Douglas's demented outpourings. He was particularly vicious when she judiciously put her inheritance out of his reach to prevent him from squandering it on the libel actions to which he was addicted. He renounced their son at the age of 14 for "plotting" with Olive, and would address her in letters as "you miserable woman".

Douglas finally got what he had long so richly deserved: a prison sentence for a criminal libel on Churchill, who was said to have issued false information on the Battle of Jutland in order to assist Jewish financiers in Britain and Germany. Murray is wrong, though, to suggest that "the majority of the British public" in the 1920s believed in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories; very few people were ever taken in by the bizarre conspiracies about Jewish world domination, and the court found no difficulty in ripping through the tissue of nonsense Douglas had issued to give him six months in Wormwood Scrubs.

In an excess of spite worthy of Douglas himself, the prison authorities refused to let him keep the manuscript book of poems he had written in prison. It is a tribute to Murray's determination that the manuscript is now released, although the world could have got on well enough without Douglas's sonnet referring to Churchill's Jewish mother that starts "The leprous spawn of scattered Israel/ Spread its contagion in your English blood." Murray has a hard time attempting to elevate Douglas's poetry, but it is fun to see the old hater's comments on Eliot, "the supreme enemy of poetry", and his letter to Yeats explaining quite why the Nobel Laureate was the minor and Douglas himself the major poet.

While the publicity for this biography makes much of the author's youth (he is still an undergraduate), this is more a triumph of publishing than of literature: many of us finished books while we were still undergraduates, but it is Murray's unusual achievement to see his in print. And it is well worthwhile: Alfred Douglas is fascinating in the way that truly horrible people often are. "I have been badly treated all my life," he whined in old age. At 63, remembering his 21st birthday, he wrote, "I was so overcome with melancholy at the thought of my vanished youth that I retired after dinner to my bedroom and wept." It would be difficult to find a man more undeserving of tears.