The name on the credits which most disappoints however is not an actor’s but a screenwriter’s

The name on the credits which most disappoints, however, is not an actor’s but a screenwriter’s.That the M:i-2 script is mostly third-rate thriller-filler was to be expected; but that it comes from the pen of Robert Towne, who once wrote The Last Detail and Chinatown, seems inconceivable. It’s like Elmore Leonard ending up as chief writer on The Bill.. A friend of John Gielgud recently recollected the actor’s encounter with Lord Alfred Douglas. Gielgud asked Bosie whether the first production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which he had attended, was played as comedy or farce “I can’t remember,” Douglas replied Gielgud took that as evidence of extraordinary conceit. It is an opinion that this new biography – Douglas’s fifth – does little, for all its efforts, to shift. A friend of John Gielgud recently recollected the actor’s encounter with Lord Alfred Douglas. Gielgud asked Bosie whether the first production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which he had attended, was played as comedy or farce “I can’t remember,” Douglas replied Gielgud took that as evidence of extraordinary conceit.

It is an opinion that this new biography – Douglas’s fifth – does little, for all its efforts, to shift.
Douglas Murray began writing this life of Oscar Wilde’s fatal lover as a 16-year-old Etonian, completing it before progressing to Magdalen College, Oxford, where both Douglas and Wilde studied Credit must be given for young industry and achievement. But there’s an indulgent air to Bosie, suggesting it sprang from a schoolboy crush and never escaped.Murray’s acceptance of Bosie’s word is the first difficulty. Single sources appear from among Douglas’s many contradictory accounts: the mean Oscar Wilde and Myself, the eccentric Autobiography, the raving Without Apology, the stoic Oscar Wilde: a summing up. A desire to favour Douglas leads Murray to share certain jaundiced judgements – especially of Robbie Ross, Wilde’s first lover, literary executor and, to Bosie, “filthy bugger and blackmailer”.Traces remain, too, of Douglas’s snobbery. Take Murray’s explanation of why Alfred Taylor, the procurer of Wilde’s rough-trade “panthers”, who stood trial alongside the author, refused to testify against him. “He was different from the lower-class lads who were the main prosecution witnesses: he had been educated at Marlborough and had a strong sense of loyalty to Wilde.” If loyalty there was, friendship or regard would have induced it, not the breeding or schooling that so successfully led Taylor into pimping.Douglas’s spoilt behaviour is indulged. Foolish self-publicity on Wilde’s arrest is evidence of Bosie’s “courage”.

He is “young and rash” in Paris when his outbursts torpedo any chance his lover has of getting off. Murray unconvincingly equates the older Douglas’s six-month imprisonment for gratuitously libelling Churchill with Wilde’s two years’ hard labour. Wilde’s jail-bound bile toward Bosie in De Profundis amounts to “turn[ing] against his friend in the most astonishing way”. But Douglas’s trumpeted spiritual rebirth after his short term is accepted in the face of his enduring reactionary opinions – not least, crude anti-Semitism.As Gielgud suspected, Bosie never saw beyond his own fantastic vision of events.

While Wilde was in prison, Douglas wrote of his own, implicitly greater burdens: “if one really loves anyone, one feels any sufferings he undergoes infinitely more than if one were undergoing [them] oneself.” Other moments likewise reveal a lack of concern for others, shading into contempt. Consider how Bosie first “confesses” adultery to his wife: “You have done a dreadful thing to me… You drove me out of the state of grace and holiness into mortal sin.”Murray’s scoop lies in gaining access to a previously embargoed Home Office prison file. There’s little new, though; just drafts of a self-serving sonnet sequence, In Excelsis, an inept challenge to Wilde’s De Profundis and properly forgotten.Except for Betjeman, few revered Douglas as a writer. He was, though, pursued by many fans of Wilde, among them Ronald Firbank who, like most who got to know Douglas, concluded he was “impossible” Douglas lived too long for his biographers. Wit-bearing Oscar dies 100 pages in, leaving little but sulks and the nemesis of so many courtrooms Throughout, Murray displays considerable narrative flair.

Still, his book closely shadows two earlier biographies, by Rupert Croft-Cooke and H Montgomery Hyde.A weakness for male beauty haunted Bosie to the end. At 56, he fell for the 18-year-old Dorian Gray figure Ivor Goring, whom he privately described as “very good-looking and attractive”. Goring was, briefly, equally infatuated with Wilde’s great love – or with the glamour of accompanying him. But he soon outgrew the adolescent “pash”; as will alert readers of Bosie.. Some Times in America by Alexander Chancellor (Picador, £7.99) This primarily covers an ill-fated year as Talk of the Town diarist for Tina Brown’s New Yorker. Once the Weasel for this paper, Chancellor displays impeccably groomed claws, his convivial prose caressing the palate like a good burgundy. However, his self-consciously wide-eyed persona, more Hugh Grant than Cary, disastrously gets mistaken for a bumpkin by New York sophisticates.