Cultural history Archives - Page 8 of 23

Italo Svevo biography

February 24, 2016 by Roy Johnson

his life, writings, and cultural context

Italo Svevo was the pen name of the Austro-Italian writer Aron Ettore Schmitz. He was born in 1861 in Trieste, which at that time was part of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian empire – and remained so until the end of the first world war. His mother was Italian, and his father a German Jewish businessman. He was educated with his brothers at a commercial school in Wurzburg, Germany, where he became fluent in the language. Italian was actually his second language, the first being the Triestine dialect which was used at home.

After two further years of business studies in Trieste, he was forced to abandon his studies when his father’s glassware business went bankrupt. He took up employment as a correspondence clerk in the Viennese Union Bank, where he stayed for the next twenty years. During this time he produced his first novel, Una vita (A Life) (1893). Like all his other books, it was published at his own expense.

Following the death of his parents he married his cousin Livia Veneziano, the daughter of a wealthy Italian who manufactured specialised industrial paints used on warships. In 1897 he became a partner in his father-in-law’s business and was quite successful in commercial activities, making profitable excursions to France and Germany, and setting up a branch of the company in England.

In 1898 he published his second novel Senilità (As a Man Grows Older). Both of these novels were largely ignored at the time, but in 1907 Svevo was enrolled at the Berlitz School of Languages to learn English, where his tutor was a twenty-five year old James Joyce, who had taken up exile in Trieste. Joyce read the novels and championed Svevo’s work. The two men became great friends.

However, Svevo was discouraged by his lack of literary success, and appears to have given up writing completely around that time. He devoted the next twenty-five years to his work as a representative for the family paint business in which, despite his cultural and intellectual interests, he was successfully enterprising. He lived for some time in the borough of Greenwich in south London, documenting the differences he encountered in Edwardian English culture in a series of letters he wrote to his wife: This England is So Different: Italo Svevo’s London Writings.

In 1925 when Svevo published La Conscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno), Joyce arranged for the work to be translated into French and published in Paris. The work was critically acclaimed and marked his first major success. He entered into a second phase of creativity and produced a number of stories, a novella, and an unfinished novel. He spent the last years of his life lecturing on his own work and writing Further Confessions of Zeno, which was never completed. In 1928 he was involved in a motoring accident in Trieste and he died a few days later from his injuries.

Italo Svevo – principal works

1893 – Una vita (A Life)

1898 – Senilità (As a Man Grows Older

1925 – La conscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno)

1926 – La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla

1926 – Una burla riuscita (A Perfect Hoax)

1927 – La madre (The Mother)

Italo Svevo – study resources

A Life – Secker & Warburg- Amazon UK

A Life – Secker & Warburg – Amazon US

As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon UK

As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon US

Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon US

Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon UK

Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon US

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Jacob Epstein

January 2, 2018 by Roy Johnson

controversial Anglo-American modernist sculptor

Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) was a sculptor who became a controversial pioneer in the world of modernist British art. He was born in New York’s Lower East Side to Jewish immigrant parents who had escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland. When the family moved to a more respectable neighbourhood, he chose to remain amongst the ‘Russian, Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Chinese’ who clustered in what was then a very unfashionable part of the city.

Rock Drill

In 1902 he travelled to France, enrolling at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and visiting Rodin’s studio. He was a fan of his fellow countryman Walt Whitman, and there is a distinct element of homo-eroticism in his early works that parallels the celebration of the human body (largely Male) that features in Whitman’s poems. This is an element of his vision that became important in later works and his battles with censorship and even the mutilation of his statues and carvings.

In 1905 he transferred to London and quickly made contact with people such as George Bernard Shaw and Augustus John. Even more surprisingly he secured a large public commission at the age of only twenty-seven. This was for a series of decorative statues for the new headquarters of the British Medical Association in the Strand.

The nude figures he produced depicting maternity and Hygieia (goddess of health and cleanliness) became the target of outraged prudish hostility, and a press campaign was mounted by the Evening Standard. The project was completed, but it was twenty years before he received another architectural commission.

He was supported and befriended by Eric Gill, who had similar ambitions to bring primitive elemental forms into public art. They planned to build a private temple in Sussex where they could express their enthusiasm for nudity and sexuality without hindrance. The project was never completed, but the celebration of human physicality pervaded almost everything they went on to produce.

Epstein’s next major work was the now-famous tomb of Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. This was admired by the young fellow-immigrant artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, but the French authorities protested against the winged figure’s nakedness and ordered its genitals to be obliterated. They were later hacked off by protesters more than once.

Meanwhile his domestic life was no less controversial. He was married to Margaret Dunlop but at the same time he had a number of lovers who his wife not only tolerated but allowed to live in the family home, along with the children who were conceived by them as a result.

Epstein isolated himself in a Sussex coastal village and produced a number of excellent abstracted figures of pregnant females and copulating doves, clearly influenced by the work of Constantin Brancusi who he had met in Paris. It has to be said that the works of Epstein, Brancusi, and Gaudier-Brzeska became almost indistinguishable around this period.

Just before the outbreak of war, in 1913 Epstein produced the first drawings for what was to become his most important work – Rock Drill. In its first version the dramatically modelled figure of a quarry worker was mounted astride a tripod, handling a real drilling machine.

Nothing could have better symbolised the Vorticist movement which championed his work in the second (and final) edition of its magazine BLAST. But Epstein refused to join the group founded by his supporter Wyndham Lewis. In fact Epstein was so appalled by the mechanised slaughter of young soldiers in the conflict of 1914-1918 that he removed the drill and tripod from the original sculpture.

This turned out to produce a much more aesthetically pleasing result – the futuristic head and torso which seemed to symbolise the machine age. Yet following this success his activity more or less split into two parts. The first was producing traditional bronze portrait busts for celebrities in a style that could have come from any time in the previous two-hundred years. The second was his far more interesting series of monumental carvings and sculptures that expressed something of the modern age. The first part provided him with an income; the second with continued notoriety.

Femaile Figure

It is amazing to recall the virulent hostility (and anti-Semitism) that his work aroused. Even the Royal Academy participated in the mutilation of his public commissions. Following the exhibition of his controversial Adam (1938) the statue was sold off for next to nothing and later displayed in a Blackpool funfair. Visitors were charged a shilling entry to view its enlarged genitals as a form of pornographic amusement. The same fate befell his next major work, Jacob and the Angel (1941) – though this has since been rescued and is now in the relative safety of the Tate Gallery.

He participated in the Festival of Britain 1951) but by this time he was being outflanked by younger contemporaries such as Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Lynn Chadwick. He completed further commissions for religious figures, notably on the re-built Coventry Cathedral, but his final secular work was the magnificent war memorial that stands in front of TUC headquarters at Congress House in London.

He was knighted in 1954, but his later years were marked by personal loss. His son died of a heart attack in 1954, and his daughter committed suicide later the same year. Epstein himself died in 1959 at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington – next door but one to the birthplace of Virginia Woolf.

Jacob Epstein biography – But the book at Amazon UK

Jacob Epstein biography – Buy the book at Amazon US

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John Lehmann biography

February 5, 2013 by Roy Johnson

poet, editor, publisher, biographer, memorist

John Lehmann (full name Rudolph John Frederick Lehmann) was born in Buckinghamshire in 1907 into a wealthy family. His father was Rudolph Chambers Lehmann, an English writer and Liberal Party politician. His elder sisters were the novelist Rosamond Lehmann and the actress Beatrix Lehmann.

John Lehmann was educated at the prestigious public school Eaton, and went on to study modern languages at Trinity College Cambridge, where he began writing poetry and forming gay relationships. Whilst at university he became a close friend of Julian Bell (Vanessa Bell’s son) which provided him with an introduction to the Bloomsbury Group.

His first collection of poetry A Garden Revisited (1931) was published by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press, with which he formed a close attachment. He brought his contacts with the new young generation of poets to the press. The result was the groundbreaking collection New Signatures (1932) which included work by William Empson, Julian Bell and Lehmann himself from Cambridge, plus W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis from Oxford.

He worked as an assistant-cum-manager at the Press (described in his amusing memoir Thrown to the Woolfs) until differences of opinion with Leonard over the policy of publishing young writers caused a temporary rift between them.

John Lehmann left Britain and worked as a journalist, travelled to the U.S.S.R. (as it was called at that time) and wrote poetry in Vienna from 1932 to 1936. He then returned to Britain to launch the journal New Writing. This published the work of his contemporaries Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, V.S. Pritchett, and Stephen Spender.

The magazine featured new writing from Europe and beyond mixed with photographic essays and examples of modern art, and it also included recent poetry. Its editorial line explicitly supported internationalism (especially the republicans in the Spanish Civil War) and it was politically ‘committed’ to the left at a time when the English establishment was dithering in the face of fascism.

It lasted for fourteen years, first under the aegis of the Bodley Head, then Lawrence and Wishart, before eventually being taken on by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. A cheaper version was launched as Penguin New Writing in 1939.

In 1938 Lehmann returned to favour with the Hogarth Press and joined it again as a full working partner, buying out Virginia Woolf’s fifty percent share in the company. He was an editor and general manager at a time when in addition to works by Virginia Woolf such as Between the Acts, A Haunted House, and The Death of the Moth, he oversaw the publication of works by Henry Green, George Orwell, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

However, the partnership foundered again 1945. Lehmann wanted to introduce modern business practices, raising share capital, and employing publicists and agents. But Leonard had always run the press as a streamlined independent enterprise, with a minimum of overheads – a policy which had been enormously successful and had brought in considerable profits.

So Lehmann understandably left and in 1946 set up his own publishing company, John Lehmann Limited with his sister Rosamond. He published books by young poets Thom Gunn and Laurie Lee, as well as the celebrated cookery writer, Elizabeth David. He also edited the paperback series Penguin New Writing between 1946 and 1950. After the collapse of his own company in 1952 he took over at the London Magazine and edited until handing over to fellow poet and critic Alan Ross in 1961.

In the late 1960s and 1970s he was a frequent visitor on the American lecture circuit. He subsequently wrote biographies of Rupert Brooke, Edith Sitwell, and Virginia Woolf, as well as three volumes of autobiography. He also wrote about his gay relationships in the persona of a fictional character Jack Marlowe. The late confessional novel In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976) offers an account of his promiscuous life in Berlin, Vienna, and London.

The Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

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John Maynard Keynes

March 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

economist, philosopher, politician, and statesman

John Maynard Keynes Is a one-volume condensation and updated version of Robert Skidelsky’s monumental three-volume biography of the economist, political philosopher, and statesman which was originally published between 1983 and 2000.

Maynard Keynes was born and raised in Cambridge, the seat of intellectual and political power, even more so then than now. He was also educated at Eaton – and yet his social origins were quite modest. One grandfather John Brown was an apprentice printer from Lancashire who later graduated from Owens College (Manchester University) and went on to become a preacher. The other grandfather made his fortune from cultivating dahlias and roses. His father John Neville Keynes went to University College London and then to Cambridge where he briefly became a lecturer and where he met Keynes’ mother, who was a student at Newnham Hall. However, Neville (the family used their middle names) did not feel suited to the life of a don, and became instead an administrator in the examinations board.

Keynes was raised in a fairly prosperous middle-class household, where he was coached by his parents and learned German from a governess. As a youngster he was tall, clever, rather sickly, and very under-confident regarding his own appearance. He proved to be particularly good at mathematics and algebra, but even so he was often taken out of various schools and educated at home. Nevertheless he succeeded in winning a scholarship to Eton in a competitive examination.

At Eaton he was at the top of an intellectual elite which existed in the heart of a social elite, and he thrived in the cultural ambiance, winning countless prizes. Yet remarkably, despite a mastery in classics and mathematics and his sensitivity to subjects such as medieval poetry, his favourite sport was the almost imbecilic Eton Wall game. Nevertheless, by the age of nineteen he went out in a blaze of glory to take up a scholarship he had won at King’s College Cambridge.

King’s is a ‘sister institution’ of Eton going back to its foundation in 1441 by Henry VI. Keynes threw himself into its many debating societies and clubs, and was almost immediately invited to join the semi-secret group of ‘Apostles’ (membership was for life) where he met Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and E.M. Forster – through whom he was introduced to Thoby Steven and Clive Bell. This placed him centrally as a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which was later formed out of these friendships.

Like many others of his generation he came under the influence of G.E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica (1903) gave a theoretical rationale to their philosophy of ‘friendship. art, and the pursuit of happiness’. It also served as a moral justification for the practice of homosexuality which was common amongst public schoolboys and undergraduates at that time, despite the then recent conviction of Oscar Wilde which still cast its shadow over them.

As a postgraduate however, he abandoned the very subject for which he later became famous (Economics) in favour of preparation for the Civil Service examinations. On successfully completing these, he became a junior clerk in the India Office (hours 11.00 to 5.00 pm) a job with which he rapidly became bored. When he was offered a lecturing job back at Cambridge, he took it.

At this point Keynes’s personal life became quite complex, with cross-connections that have since made the Bloomsbury Group famous. He was a friend and ex-lover of Lytton Strachey, who had fallen in love with his own cousin Duncan Grant. However, Grant was involved in an affair with fellow Apostle, Arthur Hobhouse, a former love-object of Keynes. When that affair came to an end Keynes and Grant became lovers – much to Strachey’s chagrin. None of George Moore’s abstract theorising about ‘the good’ and ‘the beloved person’ offered them any protection against the emotional ravages of jealousy, possessiveness, and sexual rivalry.The amazing thing is that they all remained friends.

Back in his spiritual (and actual) home Cambridge, Keynes devoted himself to lecturing on money, applying his talent for mathematics to the very inexact pseudo-science of economics. He also pursued journalism, meanwhile working on a major thesis on probability theory, supporting the Liberal cause and resolutely defending free trade. Whilst all this high-minded ethical philosophising and fiscal theorising was going on, Keynes was meanwhile cruising London parks and public baths, picking up rent boys, and recording his sexual encounters in his private diaries.

When the Bloomsberries began to meet in Fitzroy Square, this introduced the novelty of female company, where newly liberated women (such as the Stephen sisters, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) were free to mix safely with their brothers’ friends – since they were largely non-threatening homosexuals. Keynes gave group members advice on investments, and in some case even took over their financial affairs, as well as gambling on the stock exchange himself.

However, this mixing with Bloomsbury also brought him personal distress. Duncan Grant started an affair with Adrian Stephen, which left Keynes having to console himself with a succession of Cambridge dons, though the two men continued to write to each other as friends. Keynes moved into Virginia Woolf’s menage in Brunswick Square, produced his study Indian Currency and Finance at high speed, and attended the Ballets Russes where he admired Nijinsky’s legs.

Suddenly this Edwardian bliss was shattered by two events – the advent of war in 1914, and an associated banking crisis. Keynes did not participate in the conflict, but he was drafted into the Treasury where his recommendations were accepted by Lloyd George and a banking collapse was averted. As a result, he rapidly became a secretary and adviser to the cabinet. At a personal level, he finally ‘lost’ Duncan Grant, who went to live with his lover David Garnett and Vanessa Bell in a ménage à trois.

When the war got worse, Keynes refused to be called up for service, and when summoned by the conscription tribunal sent them a letter saying he was too busy to attend. But he was put under pressure by his friends (particularly Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell) to resign from his work which they described as ‘finding ways to kill Germans more cheaply’.

However, Keynes rationalised his position to himself, and during the war he became the focal point of the Bloomsbury Group’s London base in the role of landlord at Gordon Square. He worked at the Treasury during the week and at weekends sojourned either with Ottiline Morrell at Garsington or with Vanessa Bell at Charleston.

Professionally he operated at a high level in Britain’s financial and political exchanges with its allies in the war effort – which founded the basis of his later success as a diplomatic ‘persuader’. The cultural high point of his mixing with the great and good came when he persuaded the prime minister to let him buy paintings from the collection of Degas for the National Gallery. His loyal Bloomsbury friends despaired of this social climbing, but then suddenly the end of the war changed everything.

Keynes played an important part in the Paris peace conference in 1919 and the economic base of the German war reparations – though his suggestions for a just solution were rejected. But out of this experience came his best-selling study The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a publication that made him internationally famous. He argued that the harsh reparations would leave Germany unable to pay – which proved to be the case, and resulted in the catastrophic devaluation of the Deutschmark in the early 1920s.

In the years that followed he divided his time between academic work in Cambridge and financial-political work in London. He also made a lot of money from investments and journalism, and spent it buying paintings by European modernists. He formed a syndicate to speculate on foreign currency exchanges, and even when it collapsed into bankruptcy, he immediately formed another – and made yet more money. Meanwhile his secretary Naomi Bentwick had fallen desperately in love with him. Despite their professional proximity, she seems not to have noticed that he was having an affair with his fellow Apostle, Sebastian Sprott.

In the early 1920s Keynes was actively involved in solving the lingering problem of post-war reparations, something in which he participated as an economist, a government advisor, and (secretly) as an unofficial diplomatist. At the same time he formed a group to take over the liberal journal Nation and Athenaeum of which he made Leonard Woolf the editor. Then, in the midst of all this, he surprised everyone by falling in love with the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, who stayed in England when Diaghilev de-camped to Monte Carlo.

The problem for Lydia was that she ran foul of Bloomsbury Group snobbishness, and was shunned by them as a feather-brained outsider. Fortunately, she was warmly welcomed by Keynes’s parents as a prospective daughter-in-law. After she received a decree nisi (from her bigamous husband Rodolpho Barocchi) she and Keynes got married in 1925, and were visited on their honeymoon by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had to borrow the money for his train fare, having given away the millions of his inherited fortune.

Inspired by the public interest in ‘new economies’, Keynes visited the Soviet Union more than once, where he saw through the intellectual sham of Stalinism. Around this time he got to befriend fellow travellers Sydney and Beatrice Webb who swallowed whole the bogus statistics they were fed in Russia to produce Societ Communism: A New Civilization?, a book which famously shed its question mark between editions. Later he became friendly with the Fabians (and puritans) George Bernard Shaw and H.G.Wells.

For all his fame as a guru of economic trends, the Wall Street crash of 1929 took Keynes by surprise, and he lost heavily on his own investments. Nevertheless, he was invited to play a key role in the Economic Advisory Committee and thereby developed an insider knowledge of banking and exchange rates. The committee also involved him in a great deal of energy-sapping infighting amongst his fellow economists. But as the slump of the 1930s went on, his views became less popular. Keynes thought that Britain should spend its way out of the depression, a view which many observers thought was counter-intuitive.

Despite all Keynes theorising, he changed his mind on a number of economic fundamentals. He believed in a classical free trade policy, but embraced protectionism when it suited his purposes. He both supported the gold standard – and then opposed it. He was prepared to change his mind (and theories) to suit the facts – indeed he believed that economics was a form of ‘intuition’, which looks suspiciously like ‘make it up as you go along’.

In the early 1930s he lost a lot of personal friends – such as fellow Apostles Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, and he also lost influence in the public sphere. He used the quiet period to complete his major opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. At a time when Cambridge was enthusiastically embracing Marxism, he dismissed it as a ‘hocus-pocus’ system of economics, and meanwhile his own investments recovered to increase their value by twenty-six times. A great deal of this money he spent on collecting valuable books, and on his pet project, a Cambridge Arts Theatre for King’s College.

In the late 1930s he had a period of ill health, and was admitted to a sanitarium in Wales for several weeks. And just as his health declined, so did his investments in London and on Wall Street, losing two thirds of their value, largely because he believed that ‘good’ investors should remain faithful to their original commitments, even during bad times.

When the war started Keynes was not given any official role, but he nevertheless devoted himself to the national economy and developed his thoughts in what was eventually to be published as the influential How to Pay for the War. He advanced a system of compulsory savings, which proved very unpopular. However, he fought hard to defend his ideas and was eventually re-admitted to the Treasury – though in the very ambiguous role of unpaid, part-time adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Keynes’s next major task was to negotiate with Washington over Britain’s repayments to the USA under Roosevelt’s ‘lend-lease’ scheme. He embarked on this against a backdrop of American mistrust and even hostility towards the British. Unfortunately his first efforts were regarded as arrogant and presumptuous, confirming the American view of Britain as an arch-Imperialist power. His protracted negotiations were largely unsuccessful.

Even though he was never a member of Churchill’s wartime government, he dined regularly with the prime minister at his club (the Other Club), and Keynes was made a life peer in 1942. Throughout the war he acted as a bridge between the Treasury and the various committees created by the war cabinet.

Even whilst the war was still under way Keynes had started to think about the problem of how it would be financed when it eventually came to an end. First he came up with the idea of an International Clearing Bank (ICB) a notion he borrowed from the Germans. But meanwhile the Americans were devising a rival notion of their own – spearheaded by Harry White, an anti-British communist sympathiser. The two sides compared notes. Whilst all this was going on, Keynes was appointed to the board of the Bank of England, invited to chair a committee for the promotion of the arts (to become the Arts Council) and was supporting William Beverage in his revolutionary proposals for social security.

Keynes was deeply involved in lengthy negotiations with the Americans, but even when they reached a compromise agreement he had the problem of persuading the British government to accept the outcome. Against a backdrop of the Normandy landings in June 1944 Keynes and White presided over an international assembly of economists and diplomats at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire. Between them they hammered out and established the workings of what was to become the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

As the war with Germany drew towards its end Keynes was busy with plans for surviving the post-conflict period of austerity which would inevitably be necessary. This boiled down to seeking a long term low interest loan from the USA to pay for Britain’s war debts. Taken on as adviser to the new Labour government of 1945, Keynes was despatched yet again to the USA to negotiate. The meetings were long-winded, tedious, and unproductive, with Keynes’s health deteriorating rapidly throughout. The result (because of London’s intransigence) was a failure. The delegation was forced to accept a loan on America’s terms.

The following year Keynes travelled to Savannah for the inauguration of his brain-child, the IMF. As ever there were differences between the UK and the US on how things should be run, but Keynes had done his great work in creating the institution. He celebrated just in time, because he became ill on his return shortly afterwards, but had the satisfaction of dying in his own beloved home at Tilton in Sussex.

This is a masterful biography which has been widely praised – with very good reason. It rests on a profound degree of scholarship and is the result of something like twenty-five years’ research. The bibliography and critical apparatus at the end of the book alone comprises almost two hundred pages. Only a professional historian or economist will need the full three volumes from which it is drawn.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, London: Penguin, 2013, pp.1056, ISBN: 0143036157

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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John Maynard Keynes biography

September 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

economist and government political adviser

John Maynard Keynes (pronounced “Kaynz”) was one the most important figures in the history of economics. He revolutionized the subject with his classic study, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). This is generally regarded as one of the most influential social science treatises of the twentieth century. It quickly and permanently changed the way the world looked at the economy and the role of government in society. He was born in 1883 in Cambridge into an academic family. His father, John Nevile Keynes, was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge teaching logic and political economy. His mother Florence Ada Brown was a remarkable woman who was a highly successful author and a pioneer in social reform. She was also the first woman mayor of Cambridge. An interesting family detail is that although Keynes lived to the age of sixty-three, both his parents outlived him.

He was educated at Eton and King’s College Cambridge where his intelligence made him very successful. He was almost immediately elected into the secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles. There he met Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, who became his lifelong friends. It was through these connections that he became part of the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1908 he began a serious affair with the painter Duncan Grant. Keynes had numerous affairs with other young men, but never he never had the slightest legal or social trouble, even though homosexuality was illegal at that time. This charmed life can be explained by his combination of personal brilliance, family and professional connections, and remarkable self-confidence. Keynes lectured in economics at Cambridge on and off from 1908. He also worked at the India Office and in 1913 as a member of the Royal Commission on Indian finance and currency, published his first book on the subject.

He represented the Treasury at the Versailles Peace Conference, but resigned in strong opposition to the terms of the draft treaty which he set out in his next book Economic Consequences of the Peace, (1919). Keynes argued that the war reparations imposed on Germany could not be paid by a country which had been devastated by war. He warned that this would lead to further conflict in Europe – which of course turned out to be true.

In 1925 Keynes married a Diaghilev ballerina, Lydia Lopokova, but they never had children. With his wife he helped to found the Vic-Wells ballet. He also financed the establishment of the Arts Theatre, Cambridge. Although he never earned a great deal from either his academic or government appointments, he made himself quite rich by stock market investments. He was reputed to spend the first part of every day in bed, telephoning instructions to his stock-broker. Of course he had the advantage of knowing what the government’s economic policies were going to be (since he helped to establish them) – so this sort of activity is what we would today call ‘insider trading’.

In 1936 Keynes published his most important book A General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. It revolutionized economic theory by showing how unemployment could occur involuntarily. Keynes argued that the lack of demand for goods and rising unemployment could be countered by increased government expenditure to stimulate the economy.

By 1937 Keynes’ health began to deteriorate. He would never be fully fit again. However, his expertise was such that he was given an honorary role in the Treasury during World War Two. One of the most important projects he was involved in during his last years was the setting up of the International Monetary Fund.

In 1942 Keynes was elevated to the peerage and took his seat in the House of Lords, where he sat on the Liberal benches. Around the same time he became chairman of the newly formed Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts which, before the end of the war, was renamed the British Arts Council. He died in 1946.