Virginia Woolf
A mirror to the world
The best new books celebrating Shakespeare’s centenary are full of enthusiasm and insight — but none plucks out the heart of his mystery, says Daniel Swift
Mouldering hats and wedding veils
In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her…
Gay tittle-tattle
The Comintern was the name given to the international communist network in the Soviet era, advancing the cause wherever it…
Rich and fruity
F.R. Leavis once denounced the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Dunciad for producing a meagre trickle of text through a desert…
Low life
Roy was a superb mechanic, a methodical master of his trade. For an hour I respectfully watched him work to…
Casual, funny, flirtatious, severe
Not only is this the definitive edition of T.S. Eliot’s poems, it is also the best biography of the poet we have, says Daniel Swift
Autumn
Each year when I see the first conker of the autumn I think: fire up the ancestral ovens! This incendiary…
Diary
Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day,…
Woolf haul
People have been saying that Wayne McGregor’s new Woolf Works has reinvented the three-act ballet, but not so. William Forsythe…
Public man, lover, connoisseur
To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is…
Yearning for Knole
Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s —…
Garlands of repose
It is a truism that writers of all kinds often find inspiration and solace in their gardens, as well as…
Low life
I like the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, who according to Virginia Woolf smelt like a civet cat and had…
Bloomsbury bores
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) claimed that nothing has really happened until it has been recorded, so this new exhibition at the…
Doing the Woburn Walk
The Bloomsbury of the title refers to the place, not the group. The group didn’t have a poet. ‘I would…
Led a merry dance
When Robert Sackville-West was writing Inheritance (2010), his history of Knole and the Sackvilles, he was ‘struck’, as he recalls…
Scones and Bloomsberries for tea
I have to declare an interest: as a scion of the Bloomsbury Group, I was naturally brought up on their…
At home with the Bloomsberries
Above the range in the kitchen at Charleston House is a painted inscription: ‘Grace Higgens worked here for 50 years…
