Linda Stratmann — whose publishers unwisely flag an earlier book on chloroform on the jacket notes — slightly heroically tries to contest this. In her epilogue she writes, "For too long [Queensberry] has been represented as an evil, brutal, insane bigot who set out to destroy literary genius Oscar Wilde." She refers to Queensberry's "too short life", and describes how "reassessing Queensberry today we might find him difficult, abrasive and opinionated, but fundamentally well-meaning. We might even like him." I doubt that.

"Cher fat Boy" opens a typical letter to Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery, "I presume the savoury odour of your Jew money bags has too delicious a fragrance to allow me to expect any justice in high quarters." Rosebery had been guilty of promoting the career of Queensberry's eldest son and recommending he sit in the House of Lords. As Queensberry himself had some years earlier been prevented from sitting by his own peers he saw his son's advancement solely as an insult aimed at him. His rage over this matter — like all his rages — ended by encompassing his whole family, most of the government and, on that occasion, the Queen. A letter to the Prime Minister was headed "copy of letter sent to the Christian whoremonger and hypocrite Gladstone". Queensberry thought of himself as a free-thinker. He was certainly an early and outspoken atheist or agnostic. That was just one of the causes he probably set back some decades.

Of course his campaigning vitriol found its deepest fulfilment — and temporary vindication — in his pursuit of Oscar Wilde. It is true, as Stratmann claims, that as with the Rosebery case he may have been partly impelled by a desire to protect his sons. But his correspondence suggests that he was more propelled by his own hurt, a terrible boredom and the considerable limitations of his brain.

Queensberry long intended to persuade Wilde to sue him for libel and of course he finally succeeded with the semi-literate scrawl left at Wilde's club. What follows is well known — the collapse of that trial, the ensuing criminal prosecutions and Wilde's conviction and imprisonment. It still reads as horribly and avoidably tragic, but gains little in the retelling here from Queensberry's viewpoint. The Marquess was hero for an hour, but history swiftly began to accord him a different verdict.