Clemency Burtonhill

If you’ll excuse the pun, Paul Delany’s biography of the man commonly dubbed ‘the greatest British photographer’ brings one thing sharply into focus. For Bill Brandt was not, as it happens, British at all, but was born in 1904 to German parents of Russian extraction — a fact he denied vehemently all his adult life.

Larry Wyler is a man in conflict. He knows what makes him happy — the St Matthew Passion, sex, a beef sirloin ‘slightly charred on the outside and reddish pink in the middle, nicely peppered, with mustard aioli’. But he has all these things in his little Minnesotan life: he met his wife singing Bach;