In and out of Bloomsbury

'Delightfully written essays packed with revelations, many of them arising from Martin Ferguson Smith's access to hitherto unpublished sources. A scrupulously scholarly book that will be read with pleasure and astonishment from the first page to the last.' Professor Robin Simon, editor of The British Art Journal 'Like an intrepid archaeologist carefully unearthing treasures, Martin Ferguson Smith brings to light through painstaking research all kinds of new facts about, and relationships among, the subjects of these fascinating essays.' Mark Hussey, Distinguished Professor of English, Pace University, New York City, author of Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism: A Biography 'These meticulously researched essays are a testimony to the wonderful breadth and depth of Martin Ferguson Smith's scholarship. They present a wealth of colourful new material on artists and writers both famous and forgotten, at the heart as well as at the periphery of Bloomsbury. Both the specialist and the general reader will find plenty of interest here.' Professor Odin Dekkers, former editor of English Studies These highly original essays illuminate Virginia Woolf and a selection of other twentieth-century cultural figures - artists as well as writers. Based on detailed research and presenting previously unpublished texts, pictures, and photographs, they are notable feats of scholarly detective work. Six of them focus on four pivotal members of the Bloomsbury Group - Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry. Prominent ingredients of their story include art, writing, friendship, love, sex, mental illness, and Greek travel. The five "out of Bloomsbury" essays are about the "new" letters from the novelist Rose Macaulay to the Irish poet Katharine Tynan, the prodigious teenage talents of Dorothy L. Sayers, the surprising story of J.R.R. Tolkien's schoolmaster R.W. Reynolds, and the artist Tristram Hillier's important first visit to Portugal. The collection creates a richly varied and entertaining picture of British culture in the first half of the twentieth century.