John Clay’s first biography was of Culbertson, The Man who Made Contract Bridge (Weidenfeld, 1985). This was followed by the life of the novelist John Masters, A Regimented Life (Hodder and Stoughton, 1987). After training as a Jungian Psychotherapist, he wrote Men at Midlife (Sedgwick and Jackson, 1989) and then a biography of R D Laing, A Divided Self (Hodder and Stoughton, 1996). A second bridge book followed, Tales from the Bridge Table (Hodder and Stoughton, 1998). Having helped start up Peper Harow, a therapeutic community for disturbed adolescents, in the 1970s, he next wrote Maconochie’s Experiment (John Murray, 2002), which described a transformative penal colony set up in Australia in the 1840s. Since then, he has written a family history and memoir, Getting There (privately published, 2020).