A hundred years ahead of their time, these creative souls were pushing the boundaries of gender identity and sexual expression, and - surprisingly - finding acceptance among their friends and families. M. Forster, and others in the context of a "found family," welcoming queerness in many forms and celebrating uniqueness even as the groups members can also doll out ruthless quips about one another in their writing. Not because it was poorly narrated, but because there are so many names and connections and relationships that I so often lost track and wished I could flip back, or tab or highlight sections. I'd say that if you're new to reading about the Bloomsbury Group, this will be a good, if not innovative, introduction. But this book seemed jumbled, repetitive and superficial, with no real sense of the personalities or the milieux in which they existed.

I want to sink myself into their literary output to understand the concepts they were grappling with.Nino Strachey is a thoroughly boring narrator who reads rather than performs the next, yet another disservice she does to artists who, even in death, are more alive than the slim book that was written about them. I had thought it would also be about the group referred to as the Bright Young Things- The Mitfords and Evelyn Waugh , for example. Though there are times when the book points out that the upper classes were able to get away with more than the average person, it’s not all that critical of those situations. The idea behind this title being that the emphasis will not be on Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, etc. As skepticism, admiration, envy, and confusion ebb and flow between one chattering, seductive, thinking, inspiring generation and another, this is Gatsby made real.

I really enjoy reading about people who have led unconventional lives so I was excited to check this out. But for anyone interested in the background to books like Orlando who hasn’t read much, if anything, about Bloomsbury then this is a reasonable, undemanding introduction to its key players and their interactions with their surroundings. The best audience for this book is folks who are familiar with one or more of the famous figures and desire more information about how they lived. With a deft turn of the Bloomsbury kaleidoscope, and an impressive gift for finding treasures in the archives, Nino Strachey reveals colorful new patterns of experiments in living which speak trenchantly to our own cultural moment. There is a really central thread throughout this not only of self-expression, and authentic self, but of the fight for socialism (at one point capitalism is described as “thoroughly despicable”), Labour activism (the reality of class division and the differentiation between card carrying Labour members and those who remained on the fence) , and the ongoing dismissal of the notion of fair dealings between classes as ‘ideological’, and class traitorship.Second, I was disappointed because major parts of the book read like a list of who fucked whom, without any broader evaluation of their lives and the effects of those relationships.

Above all else, Bloomsbury was a liberating force, as Nino Strachey shows in her sparkling new book. Virginia Woolf’s affection-shady letters provide the spine of the narrative but its heart—the polyamorous relationship between Lytton, Carrington, and Ralph Patridge—is almost entirely neglected in the second half. I have long known of and been interested in the Bloomsbury Group - they are an incredibly well documented, romanticised and, dare I say it, likely overdone in many ways… However, bringing a fresh new lens to the second generation of the group, particularly as written by a direct descendent really reignited this for me. Young Bloomsbury just BRIMS with the same kind of sexy vitality embodied by the characters Nino Strachey describes in such effervescent detail.Great fun and, for all fans of the Bloomsbury Group, enormously informative - like being transported back to "dancing the night hours away underground in the pitch dark and smoke-filled avant-garde nightclubs of that day", you never know who you're going to meet. After studying at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute, Nino worked as a curator for the National Trust and English Heritage.

My view may have been unduly influenced by my other current reading - Frances Spalding's biography of Gwen Raverat. It’s questionable whether the world needs yet another book about the Bloomsbury Group but Nino Strachey’s contribution approaches the topic from an unusual angle. Just when you might have wondered if there could possibly be room for a new and revealing study of a group of lives which have been so meticulously and extensively documented, Nino's exhilarating lens offers an entirely original and thrilling focus.I also thought this was quite uneven in its attention with more time spent on Julia Strachey and Stephen Tennant. The most baffling part of the book, for me, came in the last chapters and the exploration of James Strachey's life that lead him to the USA and the bohemian scene there. Young Bloomsbury introduces us to this colorful cast of characters, including novelist Eddy Sackville-West, who wore elaborate make-up and dressed in satin and black velvet; artist Stephen Tomlin, who sculpted the heads of his male and female lovers; and author Julia Strachey, who wrote a searing tale of blighted love. In all seriousness, the environment cultivated by the elder Bloomsburys does seem to have been genuinely beneficial—radical, too, in its gender equality (class less so, however, something this book gently elides) and sexual openness, especially in contrast to the repression of the times.