It’s impossible to appreciate the context of Nino Strachey’s book “Young Bloomsbury” without a clear understanding of what Old Bloomsbury was. Unfortunately, that presents its own difficulties, since no one, not even the Bloomsbury Group’s original members, has ever agreed on how to define it. The achievements of the group took place in a variety of fields: literature (Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster), art history (Roger Fry and Clive Bell), biography (Lytton Strachey), painting and decorative arts (Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant), international politics (Leonard Woolf) and economics (John Maynard Keynes). Among them, Virginia Woolf, Keynes and Fry were the farthest-reaching innovators. But if the others did not reach the same heights, their work nonetheless remains significant.

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