Bisexuality was the Bloomsbury norm

It’s been a century since the heyday of the Bloomsbury group, and now Nino Strachey, a descendant of one of the key families, has written a superb, sparky and reflective book charting the doings of the younger members of the artistic and intellectual coterie. While it is easy to identify Old Bloomsbury – familiar names include Lytton and James Strachey, Duncan Grant, David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Desmond and Molly MacCarthy – naming the younger ‘Bloomsberries’ is a slippery task.

Do we count Dora Carrington, who loved Lytton to distraction, and after his death found she could not live without him? In order to be with Lytton, Carrington married the man he loved, Ralph Partridge, who then married Frances Marshall. James Strachey married Alix Sargent-Florence; he had a lifelong affair with Noël Olivier, and Alix had a lesbian fling or two.