Author of the classic novel Man Alone, John Mulgan emerges from this penetrating biography as a man who spoke for the generation that grew up between the wars, overshadowed by one and matured in another. From one perspective he was a glamorous figure - handsome, gifted, good at whatever he took up. From another the darker threads begin to dominate - from the sharp political concerns that saw little to celebrate, the commitment to ordinary decencies that he felt even war would not necessarily preserve, to his final years in Greece, the country that confirmed his deepest values yet helped provoke the final decision to take his own life. He wrote a few days before his death: 'It took me to the age of thirty to stop being frightened, not just of physical things, but fears of what people thought of me and other fairly useless considerations.'