Sholto Johnstone Douglas of the writer Oscar Wilde. When Wilde sued Bosie's father for libel when accused of "posing as a somdomite" ("sic"), this led to Wilde's downfall and imprisonment. In 1895, when during his trial Wilde was released on bail, Sholto Johnstone Douglas stood surety for £500 of the bail money. In his "Noel Coward: A Biography" (1996), Philip Hoare writes of "...late nineteenth-century enthusiasts of boy-love; writers, artists and Catholic converts inclined to intellectual paedophilia, among them Wilde, Frederick Rolfe, Sholto Douglas and Lord Alfred Douglas." As a portrait painter, Douglas belonged to the period of John Singer Sargent and "...led
Lord Alfred Douglas the Jews, attributing them qualities and methods which are really much more typically English than Jewish", and then indicate the country only had itself to blame if the Jews came in and trampled on it. The historian Colin Holmes indicated that while "Douglas had been to the forefront of anti-semitism in the early 1920s, he was quite unable to come to terms with the vicious racist anti-semitism in Germany" under the Nazis. Douglas started his "litigious and libellous career" by obtaining an apology and fifty guineas each from the Oxford and Cambridge university magazines "Isis" and "Cambridge" for defamatory references