As told here it is not a very interesting story. All those family sources seem to have yielded precious little of much consequence. On and around Boar's Hill, for instance, Robert got to know or ran into all manner of literary figures—Bridges, Gilbert Murray, Edmund Blunden, Robert Nichols, Masefield, Yeats, T. E. Lawrence, Walter Raleigh, Siegfried Sassoon, who had been a brother-officer in France, even Vachel Lindsay—but on this showing they never did or said anything worth remembering. Here, as elsewhere, a mass of undifferentiated detail is piled up after the manner of a bad examinee, with the reader left to spot the connections and applications, if any. Even this is preferable to the author's attempts to impart relevance to his facts.

When he exerts himself to focus on his subject's actual writing it is to comment that his early religious conflicts 'fuelled his creativity', or that the 'cornerstone' of Robert's and Nancy's relationship was 'a shared commitment to the arts', though worse than this was surely to be feared after an introduction that begins: 'A true poem is like a spring of water in a desert land.' Golly, and here I am walking past springs of water in desert lands every day for years without ever tumbling to it that what they're like is true poems.

Something that might have alleviated matters is any show of penetration, liveliness or wit, any flicker of enjoyment in the writing or personal response to the material, were it no more than malice or boredom. But no: it is very much as if the full-time biographer of the family felt or was told that here was something he was uniquely equipped to do and had better get on with willy-nilly. The book does possess one great novelty, however: it presents Laura Riding in a favourable light.