MB: There’s a chapter where you talk about how Kettle’s Yard is, and always has been, seen as an antidote to the “stuffiness” of Cambridge. Why do you think that is?

But the Tate certainly gave him cachet. So when someone grand or someone who was up and coming in the art world would come to the Tate, Jim might give them a tour. He also indefatigably went to every exhibition opening in London in the evenings after work. So,when Ben Nicholson or Barbara Hepworth or Henry Moore were young up and coming artists who nobody had ever heard of Jim was meeting them at private views and inviting himself around to their studios for tea and seeing their work literally as it came out from under the chisel or came off the easel.” The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line.She is similarly infuriated by the selling of food perfection: “That notion that everything you eat must be perfectly cooked and organic and from a farmer’s market … That’s just not always possible. It’s nice when you can eat good food and savour it and eat widely and interestingly, but it’s also fine if sometimes all you can eat is sardines on toast.” The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line. LF: Part of the reason the book is called Ways of Life is because it’s very hard to say what Jim did or was. He’s not an artist, he’s an author, but he’s also a collector and a curator, and also a lecturer. He made his own way of life. He worked out what he wanted to do, but there’s no obvious path. I think it is true that it is incredibly hard to become a senior, or even junior curator today. There’s an expectation that you’ll have done an undergraduate and an MA and a PhD, and you’ll do an unpaid internship. Who can afford to do that when paying rent in London?

But when funds did not stretch this far, they eventually settled on four almost derelict cottages that were to become Kettle’s Yard. Jim Ede in Kettle's Yard: Courtesy of Kettle's YardIt is an extraordinary tale and could not have been told better or with more sensitivity. Her book will make anyone want to pay an immediate visit * Literary Review * Sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on why someone is a brilliant collector or a brilliant raconteur,” she says. Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked - in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Art lived and a life without art, beauty, friendship and creativity was a life not worth living. Art was not for galleries alone and it certainly wasn't only for the rich. At Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. He showed generations of visitors that learning to look could be a whole new way of life. An excellent biography of Jim Ede. Reading Laura Freeman's luminous study of the curator and collector, I can't help but picture the gallery and house he built - the haven of Kettle's Yard in Cambridge * Daily Telegraph *

She retains a similar attitude towards food. “I think for people who have had anorexia or battled through depression there is a little undercurrent of it their whole lives. I hope that what my book is about is finding ways to be happy and love life. To make a future for yourself that isn’t bound by the various restrictions the illness puts on you.”The serene life they lived in Cambridge was in contrast to the “roaring” 1920s, when Jim was working at the Tate gallery and he and Helen were at the centre of a whirlwind social life that revolved around parties at their house in Hampstead, London, which were attended by artists and aristocrats. Ede’s fallibility is rather endearing, his various personal and professional failings reflected in his faltering career path. At the Tate, personal projects distracted him from his official duties, which he carried out with such startling incompetence that on one occasion he left a bag stuffed full of staff wages on the bus. The Woolfs thought him an imbecile. And yet he immediately recognised the quality of genius sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska‘s life’s work, rescuing it from the Tate’s indifferent custody; his friendship nurtured countless careers. He was born in 1895, which was the year of the Oscar Wilde trial for homosexuality. Jim grew up in an incredibly strict Methodist family. I think had he been born in another age to a different sort of family he might have been gay,” says Laura.