Sublime

days.” Henry James, then a child growing up on West Fourteenth Street, not a half mile from the Stewart family,

“Raj, in the words of James Harrington,” I began.

Five years his senior, John was an aspiring scientist—he would receive a scholarship to study neurophysiology—who kept “an exquisite laboratory in the basement,” a realm that was Paul’s idea of heaven, but to which John seldom granted his little brother admittance.

The man who would be drawn in cartoons, mocked in gossip columns, celebrated in drawing rooms, sought out by enthusiasts – the man at the centre of a famous club of thinkers, writers, politicians, and scholars, who was generally regarded with the bemused awe and wonder owed to a celebrity intellectual – appears in the letters of his late twenties a