This was a group of Bohemian thinkers and doers who revolted against the manners
         and morals of Victorian England and it included the great economist John Maynard
         Keynes;Virginia Woolf and her husband,Leonard,a famed British civil servant;
         the novelist E.M.Forester;and many number of poets,philosophers,artists and titled
         eccentrics.They flaunted convention,scoffed at religion,and had mad affairs with
         one another,writing down every word in diaries and letters in the secure belief
         history would want to know.

             Among the Bloomsbury group of 1915 were two persons who were the painter Dora
         Carrington and Lytton Strachey,whose brilliant and gossipy blend of fact and surmise
         in books such as "Eminent Victorians"changed how biography was written.He was a
         homosexual and she saw normal intimacy as a threat to her hoydenish freedom.They
         had one of the century´s strangest love affairs, bound to one another platonically but
         climbing into bed with others.And sometimes sharing these sexual partners.

             Strachey wrote:"Women in love with buggers and buggers in love with  womanizers",
         "I don´t know what the world is coming to".

                 As Strachey lay dying of stomach cancer in 1932 in his early fifties,Carrington
         tried  to asphyxiate herself in the garage downstairs.Revived,she watched him die
         and said she couldn´t go on.He was the love of her life.

                 Strachey and Carrington met at the Sussex country home of Woolf.He was tall
         and emaciated and wore a long beard that drew goatlike bleats from street louts.
         Her short-cropped hair, baring the hollow of the neck when that was never seen in
         polite society, also excited hostility. The two were written into a number of novels
        and short stories of the time, including fiction by D.H Lawrence and Aldous Huxley.
        Huxley described Carrington as having an air of  "puzzled earnestness" while Lawrence
        said: "She was always hating men, hating all active maleness  in a man. She wanted
        passive maleness".

                 There was a movie directed by Christopher Hampton which stars Emma
         Thompson as Carrington and Jonathan Pryce as Strachey.It is inspired by the 1967
         biography"Lytton Strachey" by Michael Holroyd.The movie sparkles with literacy:
         Bloomsbury always prized acerbic wit."There are times,"Strachey grumbles,"when
         I  feel like a character in a farce by Moliere".
                 The early part of the movie has a softness that shifts to a hard edge in its final
         chapters.

                 Holroyd, explaining the continuing allure of Bloomsbury, said:"It isn´t simply
         British nostalgia for an earlier time when they still had an empire and so on. Bloomsbury
         was very much opposed to imperialism abroad and materialism at home.They really
        were the progressives and the embodiment of the avant-garde in early years of this
        century.Every time we look at them again they seem to have something for the
        contemporary world, whether in sexual ethics,liberation , biography,economics,
        feminism or painting. In puzzling over the "quintessence" of Bloomsbury,Carrington
        wrote in a letter :"It was a marvelous combination of the highest intelligence,and
        appreciation of literature combined with lean humor and tremendous affection".

                Everybody in the Bloomsbury elite seemed to know everyone else of consequence
         or be related.

              Lytton´s brother James, for example, was the first to translate Sigmund Freud into
        English,a task that occupied his adult life.

             Strachey came by eccentricity naturally.He once wrote a poem about defecation."For
        me,"his essay went,"that mysterious and intimate operation has always exercised an
        extraordinary charm."

                In Bloomsbury, it is apparent, anything and everything could be talked about, in
        contrast to the reticence that had gone before.Says Holroyd:"They really opened us up
        from theVictorian age".