. . . it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth, we were the forerunners of a new dispensation….
—John Maynard Keynes, in “My Early Beliefs” (1938)

Bloomsbury, like Clapham, was a coterie. It was exclusive and clannish. It regarded outsiders as unconverted . . . . Remarks which did not show that grace had descended upon the utterer were met with killing silence . . . . Like Clapham, Bloomsbury had discovered a new creed: the same exhilaration filled the air, the same conviction that a new truth had been disclosed, a new Kingdom conquered.
—Noel Annan, in Leslie Stephen (1952)

It is startling now to be reminded that as recently as 1968—a year that saw a great many changes in our cultural life—Bloomsbury could still be described, without fear of contradiction, as “unfashionable.” In fact it was so described by Michael Holroyd in the mammoth biography of Lytton Strachey which he published that year. Yet no sooner was the pronouncement made but Bloomsbury was suddenly all the rage again, and it was no doubt Mr. Holroyd’s biography which set this great reversal in motion. There is no reason, however, to suppose that Mr. Holroyd deliberately set out to achieve so large a goal. According to his own testimony, anyway, his original intention was far more modest.[1]Yet the consequences of his immense biographical enterprise proved to be fateful indeed. Bloomsbury was triumphantly restored