Behind the official history of literature lies another story, secret, small, but much more interesting. Within this fictional secret history of literature, the British have excelled, perhaps more than any other people, with an unprecedented number of outlandish, absurd and unique writers, species as rare as William Beckford, Lewis Carroll, Montague Summers, Ronald Firbank, Aleister Crowley... or Frederick William Rolfe, better known as the mysterious Baron Corvo (1860–1913).
As with many of the authors cited, Frederick William Rolfe associated his literary skills with sexuality not already ambiguous, but frankly rebours and an excessive and baroque sensibility that led him to Catholicism as an artistic, moral, aesthetic and mystical vision; a vision to which he joined an ingrained belief in astrology, a true passion for classical mythology and even certain practices of ritual magic.

Desire and search at all offers the reader a peculiar and distorted portrait of English society in Early 20th-century Venice. An island of dilettating tourists, fake professional altruists and life-lifers disguised as gentlemen, on which Crabbe, the protagonist of the novel, floats spectrally. But The desire... it's not just a satire, nor an autobiographical chronicle more or less disguised. It is, above all, a love story, the love between Nicholas Crabbe and Zildo, a false boy, an andrgina girl (a private fantasy of Rolfe) enthused, elevated and turned into an authentic lost half of the author. It's the pure, platonic dream of the androgynous. The word love refers to "desire and pursuit at all," as Plato said in The Banquet.