A book’s index can entertain as well as inform, and in D. J. Taylor’s Lost Girls, a lively, perceptive, and gossip-strewn inquiry into an overlooked aspect of an influential corner of London’s literary life in, mainly, the 1940s, the index does not disappoint. Turning from “Horizon, ‘bugger incident,’ ” to the entries for that storied magazine’s creator and presiding genius, “Connolly, Cyril,” we find, among other accolades, “capriciousness,” “dilettante quality,” “double standards and hypocrisy,” “mother-fixation,” “self-absorption,” “self-destructiveness,” “self-propagating mystique,” “sulkiness,” “tactlessness,” and, in a final jab of the indexer’s finger, “vacillation and procrastination.”

Lost Girls is not, Taylor maintains, a book about Connolly. It is, he argues, focused on the women (“Connolly, Cyril: female coterie”) who “fizzed in his slipstream, the women whom at various times he employed, fell in love with, and very often schemed to marry, and over whom he cast a spell so prodigious that when he died, over three decades later, they came in relays to sorrow over his hospital bed.”

At this point, some readers might worry that Taylor has chosen the wrong subject. After all, apart from Sonia Brownell (who married George Orwell, and, in the post-war years, effectively ran Horizonwhile Connolly immersed himself in indolence and jaunts) the Lost Girls (Taylor concentrates on four, with asides on a few others) would merit barely a footnote in most histories, even as they linger on, in echo or caricature, in literature, a topic to which Taylor devotes a