Affairs in squares

On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers, by O.J. Simpson etc.), the best title I ever came across was Bloomsbury: the Untold Story. Now, though, BBC2’s new drama, Life in Squares, is giving us yet another chance to marvel at how many sexual permutations one small group of people can achieve.

But before all that began, Monday’s first episode was at some pains to show us the forces of Victorian stuffiness against which the Bloomsbury group rebelled. In the first scene, a suitor tried to woo Vanessa Stephen with the chat-up line, ‘Only two more days, Miss Stephen, to the opening of the trout-fishing season.’ In the second, Vanessa understandably denounced the ‘dead conversation, dead habits’ surrounding her and her sister Virginia, and flung her corset out of her bedroom window with a hearty cry of ‘Freedom!’ And just in case that wasn’t clear enough, she then told her black-clad and endlessly disapproving Aunt Mary to leave the house, because ‘we intend to live in our own way’.