![]() ![]() The twenty-year-old scholar, ending his second year in Magdalen College, describes a man who retained the prejudices and temper of an adolescent to the end of his rather long life, expiring when Allied fortunes changed in World War II. Published in 2000, Douglas Murray’s Bosie itself demonstrates the attractiveness of precocity. ![]() ![]() In death Wilde got the last laugh, as the most memorable line in the distressingly second-rate poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” worked as portent rather than verse: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.” Lord Alfred Douglas, whom we must unfortunately call by nickname “Bosie,” lived forty-three years after Wilde expired in a sordid Paris hotel room (pus oozing from every orifice, by Richard Ellmann’s account), determined to kill by word and deed the memories of his life with Wilde, triumphing finally with a succession of libel suits that adduced the truth of Gore Vidal’s truism: as one ages, litigation replaces sex. Oscar Wilde died before finding himself in this position thanks to friend/amateur editor Robert Ross, De Profundis survives as the profoundest dissection in literature of a poisoned relationship. ![]() It’s rare luck when in life we meet a person whose existence we come to loathe after several years together. ![]()
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