Frances Spalding
Aesthete of Gordon Square
The Bloomsbury industry is not as hectic as it once was, but it continues every now and then to deliver a really interesting book. This one offers a missing piece in the familiar Bloomsbury jigsaw. Today it can be assumed that readers do not need to be told that Vanessa Bell was Virginia Woolf’s sister or that Duncan Grant was a painter and the cousin of Lytton Strachey. But with another member of this group, Clive Bell, many may still feel a little uncertain as to who he was and what he did. Before this biography appeared, there was very little readily available information on his life or work. Yet this was the man who occupied a uniquely privileged position within the Bloomsbury Group, having the guts and determination to marry one of the two famous sisters and to flirt outrageously with the other, while also offering her tutorials on how to write a novel.
Bell’s central position within the Bloomsbury Group is additionally surprising given how much, as a young man, he aroused distaste. The young Leonard Woolf, while writing a roman à clef, based a character on Bell: he tosses around his ‘fat, round little body and his little, round, fat mind’. Strachey,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'What Bower brings sharply into focus here is how lonely Johnson is, how dependent on excitement and applause to stave off recurring depression.'
From the archive: Michael White analyses the life and leadership of Boris Johnson.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/crisis-what-crisis-3
'Sometimes, dragons’ greed can have comic consequences, including indigestion. We read the 1685 tale of the dragon of Wantley, whose weakness is, comically, his arse. The hero delivers a lethal kick to the dragon’s behind, and the dragon dies.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/terrors-of-the-sky
'We must all "shoot down the canard", McManus writes, that the World Cup is going to a nation "that doesn’t know or appreciate the Beautiful Game".'
Barnaby Crowcroft on the rise of Qatar.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/full-of-gas