The summer of 1952 was the longest summer Ed Morgan had ever lived. It was not dramatic. That was the strange thing—the terror and the joy and the whole complicated weight of what he and James were to each other, all of it unfolding in the unremarkable hours between ordinary things. There were no declarations, no crises, no dramatic confrontations. There was only the slow accumulation of time—afternoons in the British Museum, where they sat at separate tables in the reading room and pretended t...