To 'Flufftail' from 'Pinkpaws': The Animals is only good for celebrity-spotting

There is a fine old tradition of distinguished literary men addressing their loved ones by animal-world pet names. Evelyn Waugh saluted Laura Herbert, the woman who became his second wife, as ‘Whiskers’. Philip Larkin’s letters to his long-term girlfriend Monica Jones are full of Beatrix Potter-style references to the scrumptious carrots that his ‘darling bun’ will have unloaded on her plate at their next meeting should wicked Mr McGregor not get there first. Wanting to soften the blow of his sacking by the BBC Third Programme in the early 1950s, John Lehmann went off on holiday with an intimate known to posterity as ‘the faun’. But none of this sentimentalising comes anywhere near in its effects to the torrent of effusiveness, personal mythologising and, it has to be said, downright archness uncorked by The Animals.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy met in California in February 1953 when Isherwood was in his mid-40s and Bachardy a stripling of 18. Their relationship endured — with intermissions — until Isherwood’s death in 1986, and first turned epistolary in 1956 when Isherwood, thinking the privations of his mother’s house in Cheshire too austere for an American tourist, left Barchardy behind in their London hotel. Later correspondence was prompted by Don’s absences, sometimes abroad but on occasion in New York, furthering his career as a professional portraitist; the most interesting date from a period in the 1960s when, armed with his boyfriend’s address book and a highly plausible manner, Don heads to London to study at the Slade while Christopher sits and frets in Santa Monica.