Benjamin Britten by Paul Kildea: review The hagiographic, the psychosexual, the paedocentric, the epistolary, the political, the musical: biographers have over the decades angled Benjamin Britten every which way for their portraits. Understandably so. Not only because he was the most original musical mind to be born in England since Purcell - and the last born anywhere to have an operatic oeuvre that remains in the repertory. But also because he was a genuinely perplexing creature: a cold, touchy, childish genius, who was simultaneously a great collector, and even greater dropper, of friends. Equally ill-judged absolution and justification attends to every one of Britten's political opinions. It's surprising that someone who got it so right musically (Britten was 30 years or so ahead in his championing of Mahler, Purcell and Buxtehude) could get it so very wrong politically. But boy did Britten get it wrong. A Communist at the time of the gulags, an appeaser on the eve of the Second World War, a pacifist during the Holocaust, a willing recipient of a Japanese commission in 1941 after they had mutilated China, tight-lipped over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, anti-Churchill, pro-Edward VIII, Britten had a tin ear for politics. In 1965, while travelling through Russia, Britten brushed away concerns about the dangers of Communist totalitarianism, writing that they were "so small" compared with the perils "worrying artists" faced in the capitalist West. None of this political illiteracy earns a rebuke. It may seem unconnected to the central issues of Britten's life, this wayward politicking, but in Kildea's thesis it is key. Kildea's argument is that Britten's coldness was a defensive mechanism against a society that loathed him for his pacifism and homosexuality. But for Kildea to claim Britten - a man who had the late Queen Mother as a patron of his music festival - was a hounded outsider is laughable. As are the Britten-esque levels of sensitivity Kildea adopts when uncovering evidence for homophobia in every innocuous joke. Besides, it wasn't Britten's pacifism per se that so infuriated. It was his cowardice and hypocrisy: the way he insisted people take the fight to Fascism during the Thirties when he had nothing to lose and then wriggled out of conscription (conveniently rediscovering God to expedite this) when he did. One cannot gainsay Kildea's writing. The prose is engaging and erudite. But sound judgment is lacking from this biography. Britten was clearly a great and curious musical explorer. But, for many, he was also a monster who on just about every non-musical subject was happy to absorb the laziest clichés of his milieu. His musical activity may give the impression of a radical, as might superficially his political outlook, but, as WH Auden would note and deride, his every other move and thought - prudish, parochial, country-loving and toff-accommodating - was as English and conservative as you could get. Paul Kildea Allen Lane, £30, 688pp 1 Letters from a Life edited by Donald Mitchell, Peter Reed, Mervyn Cooke (1998-2012). 2 The Music of Benjamin Britten by Peter Evans (1996). 3 Britten's Children by John Bridcut (2006).