If you think Virginia Woolf’s novels are good, you should try her bread

I have to declare an interest: as a scion of the Bloomsbury Group, I was naturally brought up on their cooking. During the course of her research for this book I met, got to know and became friends with Jan Ondaatje Rolls. She has certainly chosen a novel way to portray that well-known group of friends about whom so much has been written that it’s hard to imagine there could be anything more to unearth. Hers is a sprightly approach. By defining them through their dinners, she makes us see the Bloomsberries from another, more domestic, more gleeful point of view: the kaleidoscope is twisted again.

This is not a cookbook tout court, for although it includes workable recipes, some of which are extremely good, ranging from ‘Mrs Dalloway’s Dinner’ to ‘Vanessa Bell’s Loving Cup’, it also contains some of only historic interest: Dora Carrington’s nectar of cowslip wine; William Cobbett’s loaf.