Christopher Wood, Richard Hillary and Jeremy Wolfenden, whose three brief biographies compose this book, were all middle-class, English, intelligent, talented – though, to varying degrees, sensitive and possessed by a fatal urge towards self-destruction. All duly succumbed and died young. All left a sense of futility and waste behind them.

There the similarities end. Wood was sexually ambivalent, Hillary heterosexual, Wolfenden an avowed homosexual. Wood and Hillary were obsessed with their mothers and viewed their fathers with indifference, if not contempt; Wolfenden ignored his mother but treated his father with grudging respect. Wood committed suicide, Hillary died on active service, Wolfenden drank himself to death. Wood left a considerable body of work behind him, Hillary wrote one book, Wolfenden frittered away his great ability.

Wood enjoyed the most substantial success. He was convinced that he was destined to become not just a good but a great painter and by the time he died he seemed to be on the point of establishing himself as a major figure. ‘In the paintings of his last two years,’ wrote Eric Newton, ‘Christopher Wood can be compared to no one but himself … His nearest parallel is perhaps the poetry of Keats!’ His paintings of Tréboul, Newton concluded, ‘have a clarity and a lyrical intensity that take one right back to Piero della Francesca’.

But even in Wood’s moment of success it seemed to some that he was a comet which had run its brilliant course and was now doomed to extinction. There was a hectic urgency about his last years which suggests he knew his time was running out. His health was ruined by opium, his mind increasingly prey to fearful delusions; it surprised few who knew him well when he threw himself in front of a train at Salisbury station in August 1930.

Richard Hillary was only eleven when Wood died. Wood charmed all he met; Hillary was surly, rebarbative, attractive to women but viewed with suspicion by most men – ‘that shit Hillary’ was the automatic response to any mention of him at school or university. He became a fighter pilot at the outbreak of war, fought gallantly, was hideously burnt when shot down in September 1940, had his seared face and hands patched up by the plastic surgeon A H MacIndoe and, though patently unfit to fly, bullied and cajoled his way back into the air and duly perished.

He is remembered for the book he wrote about his experiences, The Last Enemy. I read it as a schoolboy when it was first published and can still recall its overwhelming impact. It seemed to catch and freeze, in an instant of startling clarity, the potent cocktail of courage, patriotism, indifference, fatalism and hunger for high-pressure living which impelled the fighter pilots towards almost certain death. Read again fifty years later, it was less impressive; yet, as Faulks puts it, ‘It has succeeded in holding its own as a book whose passionate reporting no internal shortcomings and no change of fashion can devalue!’ It won its author instant celebrity and a heroic status which he half relished, half fiercely rejected.

There was nothing heroic about Jeremy Wolfenden. Born fifteen years after Hillary, he was a child prodigy, knowing the Greek alphabet by the age of three, reading fluently by four. His arrogance was understandable but offensive. ‘Of course, we can’t all be brilliant, but I find it helps’, he wrote. His friends, says Faulks, ‘told him that he was the cleverest boy in England and he saw no particular reason to demur’.

But he never managed to harness his formidable intellect to any serious purpose; he was bored and restless, made a half-hearted living in journalism, flirted disdainfully and disastrously with the world of secret intelligence, took refuge in drink and the pursuit of catamites. This last proved doubly embarrassing when his father was put in charge of a committee set up to consider homosexual offences and produced a report which the Home Secretary of the day found annoyingly liberal. Henceforth, if Jeremy Wolfenden were to fall foul of the existing law, he would gravely damage his father’s attempts to reform it.

Sebastian Faulks describes his three heroes manqués with sympathy and understanding. His style is sometimes curiously staccato, but The Fatal Englishman, unsurprisingly, is an extremely well-written book. He has produced three excellent mini-biographies; whether, as his publisher claims, he has written an ‘ambitious triple biography’ is another matter. There are not many conclusions to be drawn from this book about youth, or Englishmen, or even the artistic temperament. The word ‘Fatal’ in the title is itself uncertainly applicable; Wolfenden perhaps was doomed from the start to a disastrous end but, if things had been a little different, Wood and Hillary might have lived long and successful lives.

What binds these three studies is a sense of talent gone sour and creative force turned inward to destructive ends. One could easily find three young Frenchmen or Americans, from the nineteenth as well as twentieth century, who would exemplify the same experience. But the spectacle would be no more or less poignant because of its country or its generation. Long after reading, The Fatal Englishman will linger sadly in the mind like the flame of an extinguished candle.