‘It seems, perhaps, a strange and unnecessary thing to go prowling back into the recesses of the past and to lift the decent curtain which has covered the weary ugly follies . . .’

– Lord Howard de Walden, my mother’s father, in a letter to his five-year-old son; Gallipoli, 1915

‘What do you know about your own family anyway? They’re such secretive organisms, I can’t be doing with them.’

– James Brooke to William Beckwith: Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)