If anyone can explain the wild heartstopping joy of these intricate ever-changing yet repetitive rhythms Ciaran Carson can: his exceptional gifts as a poet

If anyone can explain the wild, heartstopping joy of these intricate, ever-changing yet repetitive rhythms, Ciaran Carson can: his exceptional gifts as a poet have you clapping and laughing with the swing and twist of his perception. Turn the page, though, and a listing of names and parts may drive the ignorant reader to tap an impatient foot at the stuff of a true obsessive.
Carson loves it all – the cliched and mawkish as well as the creative and one-off. He remained, as Jane Brown says, “one of Barrie’s ‘lost boys’ “. Even towards the end of his life and at the height of his success, he didn’t want to grow up.Delhi established his international reputation, but the job which he hoped would ensure his immortality was the Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King at Liverpool. His design was approved and registered in the Vatican, and the crypt of the cathedral was built before the bombing of Liverpool in World War II brought an end to the work.

Lutyens died in 1944 not knowing that his greatest building would never be completed.. A year or two ago, a Co Kerry pub enjoyed a brief notoriety for its topless waitresses. The locals were not really shocked, only surprised that such a quaint, Sixties concept should be expected to catch on now. Karaoke, yes, and Elvis look-alike contests, but for many bemused drinkers bare breasts might have seemed as peculiar and olde worlde as the diddley- iddley strains of a real ceilidh band. They played childish games together, calling each other McNed and McSack. They planned and quarrelled over endless (mostly abortive) building schemes. She worked hard to find new, rich clients and bought him Rolls Royces, but McNed, though grateful and affectionate, was unable to return her love.

Attractive, volatile, capricious, maddening and in love with him, she filled much of his time during and after the War. The mother of Vita Sackville-West, she was the last of Lutyens’ “older women”. Only Lady Sackville, who has a chapter to herself, springs to life. The houses he designed for that pre-War way of life have not proved adaptable, and most of them are no longer in private ownership: the architecture died with the clients.Jane Brown’s portrait of Lutyens is vivid and appealing but his clients remain rather shadowy figures, perhaps because there are so many of them.