Nureyev: The Life by Julie Kavanagh; Pantheon

In his heyday, the Russian ballet star Rudolf Nureyev could fill a football stadium with balletomanes. The girls could be screaming, like they'd done for Elvis and the Beatles, but it wasn't just for a voice — it was his whole body, in white tights. He looked carved from marble, nude like a Greek statue, flying through the air. You didn't know whether you wanted to see him from the front or the back, and if you were more excited by what he was doing right now or what he was about to do. He stretched his feet and pulled his legs like a ballerina, flared his nostrils like a racehorse, lifted his chin like Greta Garbo, and for the first 10 years gave us something so fascinating to see that you never wanted to look away.

I first saw him in 1969, and it changed my life. I'd never seen such confidence. Never had anybody demanded attention like that — there was domination in it, but also generosity, for he had an ideal he was striving towards that made you want to follow every move. You almost didn't blink. He let you stare at him, he asked for it. And his technique, at first, was so heroic and silky he never broke concentration. He made no differentiation between the easy steps and the hard ones; the moments other dancers used as breathers he gave a push-pull to that was as fascinating as the soaring, scything leaps, so even after you'd seen him many times, your heart was in your throat. In dances you'd seen before, he made you forget what was coming.

Nureyev embodied the heroic perfectionism of mid-century Soviet training, which was more insistently magnificent than anything in the West. Younger male dancers quickly copied him, strode the stage like tigers, after he'd shown the way. What we did not know, until the airing in August on PBS of a new BBC documentary and the publication this month of a massive new biography, was how hard-won that technique was, how iconoclastic he'd already been in Russia (where he'd bared his legs against company policy). Before he broke ranks at the Paris airport and asked for political asylum, he was in real danger of being stifled. The Kremlin deployed their ballet as part of the war of ideas, and idealized heroic ballet was their primary export. Nureyev was messing with it.

Defecting immediately made him far more than just a dancer – he was, at a stroke, an international political figure. Only months after Yuri Gagarin had flown into space, Nureyev handed the US State Department their biggest coup in the Cold War — he wanted freedom.

YouTube has a dozen or so clips from the documentary Nureyev: The Russian Years, so you can check out for yourself the dazzling home-movies made by his lover/fellow student Teja Kremke of Nureyev's early dancing in Russia — footage which was unearthed by Julie Kavanagh, author of a huge new biography of Nureyev which gives much new information about his KGB files, his childhood, his heroic struggles to get an education and to get free — though, like many refugees, he found freedom a lonely, exasperating thing.

Nureyev: The Life is an exasperating book, well-meaning but drunk on detail; every sentence is like a slice of fruitcake. Kavanagh has made a shrine to Nureyev, crammed with every scrap of info she could find that actually touched his body.

She's worked as hard as he did, and she does make us feel how hard he had to fight to get out. Nureyev's whole family, five people, lived in a room the size of an 9 x 12 rug. His father didn't want him to dance; he was stuck in Ufa, in the Urals, already a teenager when he made it to Leningrad to get the training he really wanted, and he did get the greatest ballet teacher of his day, Pushkin, who even gave him his home.

Kavanagh has covered everything: his birth on a train on the Trans-Siberian Railway, beside Lake Baikal; the scar on his upper lip, which came from a dog-bite; his love for his mother, whom the Soviets would not let him see; the "leap to freedom" at the Paris airport; his famous partnership with prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn; his dark, sad love affair with Danish ballet superstar Erik Bruhn; the way he transformed Swan Lake, Giselle, Sleeping Beauty; encounters with modern dance; the parade of pretty boys, the gang-bangs in the sex clubs, detailed mechanics of his sex life (he seems to have become more of a top as he got less pretty, but it was always disappointingly mechanical); Mick Jagger, Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy, Stavros Niarchos, the interior decorators and clothiers and the thigh-high alligator boots; his attempts to choreograph; his need for luxury; the terrible decay of his technique, and his denial of it, which made seeing a new performance a nightmare for his fans; his sponging on his friends, but also his amazing generosity to his friends, especially when they were down.

Alas, Kavanagh is so star-struck, distracted by bling, and so dogged in her project, there's never a glimpse of the big picture. Her ideal audience is probably the generation who aren't here to read it: the cream of my generation of queers, who, like him, died of AIDS after living a life of searching, seeking, trying out possibilities our people had never had. Death took eight out of 10 from the most beautiful, talented, the wittiest of the boomer queers. He was one of them, one of the icons, a man who was always an outsider. He wasn't Russian, he was a Tatar. He was Russian like James Brown was American. He had to fight his way all the way. He was an artist, he wanted to be a contender.