ANY ATTEMPT TO ANALYSE Graham is fraught with difficulties, even his close associates found him hard to fathom. His early publisher and long-time acquaintance, Frank Harris, said of him, ‘[H]ow little I knew Graham; how reticent he was or proud with that curious secretive pride which is so Scotch and so Spanish.’ MacDiarmid described him as an enigma, and the critic Frederick Watson considered him ‘a very elusive personality’. Exasperated by his contradictions, Watts described him as ‘a plethora of paradoxes’. The waters were muddied further by half-truths and myths, some of which Graham helped elaborate into the legend of the hybrid Spanish hidalgo and adventurous Scottish laird, but there has been no shortage of willing accomplices. Perhaps it was, as the ever-tactful Maitland suggested, that ‘life has been turned into art thereby representing real life more vividly’. In other words, the truth was embellished to make it truer. This closely resembles what Terry Eagleton described as ‘Truth, the cognitive, becomes that which satisfies the mind … Morality is converted to a matter of style, pleasure and intuition. How should one live one’s life properly? By turning oneself into an artefact’, which, to resolve his paradoxes and contradictions, is exactly what Graham succeeded in becoming. But there was also a strong streak of cultured perversity in his character that Professor John Mackenzie wisely recognised. Quoting from Disraeli’s novel Sybil, Mackenzie wrote of Graham’s attraction to life’s absurdities, ‘I rather like bad wine, one gets so bored with good wine’. More importantly, perhaps, he had a patrician’s scorn for mere wealth, and understood that any form of success was ultimately distorting, corrosive, and disappointing.

Describing Graham as a socialist also remains problematic. At the beginning of his political career he was an inspired late Victorian rebel, and like Hyndman and Champion, two other widely travelled political itinerants, he was a ‘Tory socialist’, more than satisfying Walter Bagehot’s studied judgement that ‘the essence of Toryism is enjoyment’. Instinctively anti-authoritarian, confident, and self-willed, he sought out and co-opted idealistic socialistic doctrines to advance what was a naively optimistic but deeply reactionary conservatism, opposing overwhelming tides of economic, technological, scientific, and social change.