The overarching theme of the book is the search for understanding why Connolly, though he was widely recognised as a leading man of letters and a highly distinguished critic, failed to produce a major work of literature.

This part consists of an erudite discussion of literary styles, with Connolly posing the question of what the following ten years would bring in the world of literature and what sort of writing would last.

He comments:Somewhere in the facts I have recorded lurk the causes of that sloth by which I have been disabled, somewhere lies the sin whose guilt is at my door, increased by compound interest faster than promise, and through them run those romantic ideas and fallacies, those errors of judgement against which the validity of my criticism must be measured.In "The Branching Ogham", Connolly describes his early life as a single child living variously with his army father in South Africa, his aunt at Clontarf Castle in Ireland and with his grandmother in England.

He eventually established a friendship with one of his tormentors Godfrey Meynell, a boy of an identical background but who instead followed a military career and won a posthumous Victoria Cross on the North West Frontier.

"I was now fifteen, dirty, inky, miserable, untidy, a bad fag, a coward at games, lazy at work, unpopular with my masters and superiors, anxious to curry favour and yet to bully whom I dared."

"Renaissance" marks a settled period for Connolly at the end of his second year establishing his popularity and friendship with others with a shared interest in literature, Dadie Rylands among others.

The "Background of the Lilies" refers to the pre-Raphaelite culture in vogue at Eton and discusses the contributions to Connolly's development of five key teachers, including Hugh Macnaughten, "an ogre for the purple patch", who personified the romantic pre-Raphaelite tradition and the ruling philosophy of Platonism, and headmaster Cyril Alington, a worldly teacher with the cult of light verse such as Winthrop Mackworth Praed and Eton's own J. K. Stephen.

After an embarrassing incident at the Folies Bergère, the couple head to the south of France and the Spanish border, to return so penniless that Connolly spends a night in the kip at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

"Vale" describes Connolly's comfortable last term with the scholarship in the bag and all the privileges of Pop, but demonstrates a feeling of ennui: "all my own attempts to write were doomed to failure.

He made a friendship with Brian Howard, but moral cowardice and academic outlook debarred him from making friends with Harold Acton, Oliver Messel, Robert Byron, Henry Green and Anthony Powell.

Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over.... Once again romanticism with its death wish is to blame, for it lays an emphasis on childhood, on a fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doctrine of future redemption".