Stefan Collini writes:

It would obviously be reductive to try to explain Bowra’s social monstrousness entirely in terms of early trouble with girls, but it’s tempting. He spent his first years in China, where his father worked in the Chinese Maritime Customs, rising to the top of that European-staffed organisation as chief secretary (and thus becoming, though Mitchell can be forgiven for not remarking the connection, Perry Anderson’s father’s immediate superior). Sent back to England to boarding school in 1910, the child was starved of affection, and he built his defences early and strong. He was always conscious of being short, with hardly any neck; one observer saw him as Humpty Dumpty, another compared him to ‘one of Beatrix Potter’s pigs’. The dazzling talk, as Nietzsche irreverently suggested about Socrates, may have developed partly as compensation for a lack of conventional attractiveness. Mitchell has uncovered one or two early crushes on young women which may have been more than that, and later there were sadly comic proposals to some of the few eligible women in his milieu. But, in best Greek fashion, he mainly reserved his attentions for young men, though it seems his passion was rarely if ever requited. Buggery in Berlin in the early 1930s met some needs; he became more circumspect in Britain as he became more prominent. He never lived anywhere but in all-male institutions from the age of 12 till his death. The centre of a glittering circle, it is possible that he lived a life of profound loneliness.

(LRB 12 February 2009)

Oxford | hardback 385 pp. |ISBN: 9780199295845