“Sometimes small is better.” This scholarly, lucid, and thoughtful book traces the line of succession from Sigmund Freud and on to Melanie Klein, W. R. D. Fairbairn, and D. W. Winnicott. These three object-relations therapists, key figures in the “British school,” are shown to us in terms of the development of the British school as such, their own internal development, and their legacy to psychoanalysis as a whole.

Meticulously researched, and using personal contacts with key historians and psychoanalysts who were close to, or are part of, the British school, Hughes demonstrates the best use of psychoanalytically oriented biography, that is, not “psychobiography” but insightful intellectual history. She helps us to understand the genesis of the British psychoanalytic community as a whole, the British object-relations group, and the individual development of Klein, Fairbairn, and Winnicott, in succinct, meaningful ways.