Patrick O’Connor
Too Many B…s
Letters From a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten Vols One & Two 1923-1945
By Donald Mitchell & Philip Reed (eds)
Faber & Faber 1403pp £75 order from our bookshop
In his introduction, itself a short book, Donald Mitchell invokes that old devil Freud to be a witness at the dismembering of Benji Britten’s young self: ‘If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success with it.’
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