by Ian Collins (Yale £25, 384 pp) At last! An artist who had a happy childhood! The Craxtons of 8 Grove End Road, St John’s Wood sound like a delightfully bohemian 1920s bunch: musical parents, five sons, one daughter, piano played, trees climbed, guests visiting for a week and staying for four years, family holidays spent in a converted Army hut on the beach in Sussex. The only fly in the ointment was that fourth son John — the subject of Ian Collins’s evocative biography of the artist whom we most associate with Greece —was detested by his elder brother Antony. John was dreamy, delicate, fey; Antony was ramrod-straight and would become a BBC producer and pillar of the Establishment.