When Iris Murdoch was grieving for her lover Franz Steiner, a few weeks after his death in late 1952, she talked for hours on end with fellow writer and eventual Nobel winner Elias Canetti. It was a foggy London night and Canetti offered her a bed, telling her that she could lock herself into the room where they were talking and he would sleep somewhere else. ‘She looked at me with surprise and disappointment,’ he wrote, and said she would go back to Oxford.

When Muriel Spark met Shirley Hazzard, in the early 1960s, both were rising stars at The New Yorker. Spark, a Scot, was a newcomer to New York. In her early forties, Spark was a decade older than Hazzard, yet they bonded and wrote to each other regularly. Despite being two of the best stylists in English of their era, they often wrote like teenage besties.

While researching Nolan’s wartime desertion from the Australian Army, I became intrigued to see a repetitiveness in his depiction of the figure of the Australian soldier – not least in the 252 paintings and drawings collectively known as the Gallipoli Series. I have traced it back to a drawing made by a psychotic patient and given to Nolan by the Melbourne psychiatrist Reg Ellery, who supported his application for release from the Army unit that was about to be sent north to face off the Japanese in New Guinea.