How two literary magazines boosted morale during the Blitz

William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to the United States in January 1939 and ends with George Orwell dying in University College Hospital in January 1950. Between these two events Loxley explores the often interconnected professional and personal lives of a number of British writers, publishers and editors — principally Orwell, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, John Lehmann and Dylan Thomas — during the second world war and its immediate aftermath.

Faced with criticism in both public and private for his and Auden’s ‘defection’, Isherwood attempted in January 1940 to justify his action to Spender by writing: ‘I believe that the future of English culture is in America, and that the building of the future will be assisted by the largest possible cultural emigration.’ Spender was unimpressed, and replied: ‘As long as England exists and is having a history, it is quite absurd to talk about culture emigration… Culture isn’t something which is quite separate from the lives of people.’