As he chronicles Britten's early years, Kildea seems impatient for him to discover sex and get cracking. Britten is "emotionally cloistered" and "repressed". At 22, he visits a seedy Barcelona nightclub, and though "the visit led nowhere", Britten "was at least now thinking of himself as a sexual being". He was ceasing to be "a prisoner of his upbringing and social censure". Throughout the book, Kildea treats religion and morality as enemies of the good life. At one point in middle age, Britten is cross with a friend for betraying his wife. Sighs Kildea, "It was the morality of his upbringing . . ."

This book has a few simple rules: everything conservative, or smacking of conservatism, is bad, and everything progressive, or claiming to be progressive, good. Everything British is bad, and everything continental good. Germany is especially good. Before Britten, the musical scene in the United Kingdom was a joke, filled with "bumbling amateurism". Boult was "treacly", Beecham a mere "playboy" and "showman", Dame Myra a provincial drip. Biographer and subject agree on this. Wrote Britten of Elgar's Symphony No 1, "I swear that only in Imperial England would such a work be tolerated." I suspect this work will be loved and esteemed long after some Britten works are curiosities.

Often it seems that nothing is good enough for poor Benjy, having to live in a world so obviously beneath him. In 1941, writes Kildea, New York was "intent on souring his outlook". "New York is the worst," said Britten to a friend. When Britten and Peter Pears returned to London in 1942, "they found the capital drab and shabby, in fact a little sordid". Couldn't Londoners have cleaned up a little for this heroic duo? What else was preoccupying them at the time?

Kildea writes openly about Britten's lifelong fixation with adolescent boys, but he also writes defensively — sometimes very defensively. He tells us that a certain 12-year-old was "old for his age". He also refers to this boy by his last name, as though he were on the same level as the adults around him. Worse, Kildea leaves the impression that those worldly, easygoing Balinese boys, unlike their cloistered counterparts in the West, actually liked it.