Certainly, the fact that no money changed hands in the past did not guarantee a positive experience for protégés. Having parried Yeats’s sexual attentions and refused his offer of marriage, Iseult Gonne moved on to a new champion, Ezra Pound, nurturer of the work of a remarkably diverse selection of writers, including James Joyce, TS Eliot and Ernst Hemingway.

Pound took Gonne’s talent seriously and offered her excellent advice in his ebullient way, but again the guidance was compromised by a desire to seduce her. Sexually, he had more success than Yeats but nothing of artistic significance emerged from the liaison