For several decades after the Second World War, a former rectory in Long Crichel in Dorset was a magnet for many prominent in the arts in Britain. The house was bought in 1945 by Eardley Knollys, a former art dealer then working with James Lees-Milne at the National Trust, and two music critics for the New Statesman, Edward Sackville-West, “Eddy” to his friends, and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. The magazine’s literary editor, Raymond Mortimer, soon joined them, making a fourth. The original idea was to form a worldlier, decidedly secular, English version of the Bruderhof, a Christian experiment in communal living that had existed in Germany from the 1920s and into the 1930s until the Nazis suppressed the group. More prosaically, the British house provided a weekend retreat for the four men where they could work, chat, eat good food, and invite their many friends. All of the Crichel Boys were homosexual, but they enjoyed female literary guests; one of the most frequent of these, Frances Partridge, initially confided to her diary that she wished she hadn’t felt obliged to apologize for her sex and for being unable to satisfy Mortimer’s ideal of feminine chic. The set survived, with changes of personnel, into the twentieth century’s last decade. Now Simon Fenwick, the author of the excellent Joan (2017), about Joan Leigh Fermor, who with her husband Patrick Leigh Fermor built a house in Greece that was a counterpart to Long Crichel, provides, in The Crichel