Like his Oxford tutor Jowett’s, the real Hopkins’s sexual impulses were almost exclusively concerned with his own sex. His mid-1860s adolescent list of sins, recorded for confessional purposes to Canon Liddon and Dr Pusey, his High Church Oxford mentors, with fastidious self-disgust in that puritanical era, nowadays often looks comic (“folly about a sugar-plum”). He looks at “tempting pictures” in Once a Week, sections of the wrong kind of novel, suggestive words in a dictionary and medical diagrams.