For a minor Edwardian writer, Frederick Rolfe, often known by his sometime pen-name Baron Corvo, has been lavishly provided with biographies, none wholly satisfactory, and most understandably focused as much on his colourful life as on his writing. He was an idiosyncratic but gifted prose-stylist, best known for Hadrian the Seventh, a fantasy of himself as Pope. This is not another full-dress biography; instead, Raven collects a series of previously published essays on various people and subjects connected to Rolfe. There are some genuine discoveries here, together with a good number of loose ends; they make, if you like, a pattern around a Rolfe-shaped space.  Rolfe began as a schoolmaster, converted precipitately to Catholicism, was thrown out of two seminaries for idleness and pre