more (at source): Golding comes across as a man of deep introspection who drank heavily to sustain himself. The biography also throws new light on how Lord of the Flies, his first and most famous novel, was published after many publishers rejected it.

It reveals how its editor altered it to exclude much material on the nuclear bomb and changed the character of Simon, one of the British schoolboys marooned on an island after a plane crash, from being too explicitly Christlike.

However, it is Golding’s attitude to women in his unpublished Men, Women & Now, which will cause most surprise in literary circles.

He had met Dora when both were taking music lessons in Marlborough, Wiltshire, when he was about 16 and she was 13, but he tried to rape her two years later when he was home during his first year at Oxford.