As a young man John Auden feared both impotence and insanity. He regularly visited whorehouses to assuage the first anxiety. To treat his incipient madness, he underwent a bastardised form of Freudian treatment from a woman named Margaret Marshall. She regarded psychoanalysis as a parlour game and held her therapeutic sessions in Paris cafés. ‘I feel safe when I am isolated and unobserved,’ Auden told her. She decided that he was too truthful to be curable. Her counter-intuitive moves were to marry him and then have an affair with their Indian manservant. If all this sounds emotionally hectic, it is.