The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives was closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, and they lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts." Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. A well-known quote, attributed to Dorothy Parker, is "they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles".
Giles Lytton Strachey was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Sir Charles Otto Desmond MacCarthy FRSL was a British writer and the foremost literary and dramatic critic of his day. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the intellectual secret society, from 1896.
Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey, first published in 1918, and consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era. Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had, until then, been regarded as heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Charles Gordon. While Nightingale is actually praised and her reputation enhanced, the book shows its other subjects in a less-than-flattering light, for instance, the intrigues of Cardinal Manning against Cardinal Newman.
Leonard Sidney Woolf was a British political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant. He was married to author Virginia Woolf. As a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, Woolf was an avid publisher of his own work and his wife's novels. A writer himself, Woolf created nineteen individual works and wrote six autobiographies. Leonard and Virginia did not have any children.
Sir Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd is an English biographer.
Dora de Houghton Carrington, known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be "vulgar and sentimental". She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.
Frank Laurence Lucas was an English classical scholar, literary critic, poet, novelist, playwright, political polemicist, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War II.
Sir Arthur Lawrence Hobhouse was a long-serving English local government Liberal politician, who is best remembered as the architect of the system of national parks of England and Wales.
Sir Richard Strachey was a British soldier and Indian administrator, the third son of Edward Strachey and grandson of Sir Henry Strachey, 1st Baronet.
Sir John Strachey was an English civil servant in British India.
Oliver Strachey CBE, a British civil servant in the Foreign Office, was a cryptographer from World War I to World War II.
James Beaumont Strachey was a British psychoanalyst, and, with his wife Alix, a translator of Sigmund Freud into English. He is perhaps best known as the general editor of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, "the international authority".
Frances Catherine Partridge CBE was an English writer. Closely connected to the Bloomsbury Group, she is probably best known for the publication of her diaries. She married Ralph Partridge in 1933. The couple had one son, (Lytton) Burgo Partridge (1935–1963).
A foodie is a person who has an ardent or refined interest in food, and who eats food not only out of hunger but also as a hobby. The related terms "gastronome" and "gourmet" define roughly the same thing, i.e. a person who enjoys food for pleasure; the connotation of "foodie" differs slightly—a sort of everyman with a love for food culture and different foods. Some, such as Paul Levy, say the foodie can still be a "foodist".
Roger Henry Pocklington Senhouse was an English publisher and translator, and a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury Group of writers, intellectuals, and artists. The private letters of writer and Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey reveal that Senhouse was his (last) lover, and with whom in the late ‘20s and early 1930s he had a sado-masochistic sexual relationship.
Isabel Ann Barr was a British journalist and writer involved in coining the terms Sloane Rangers and Foodies, in the early 1980s.
Barbara Halpern Strachey was a British author.
Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography is a 1967–68 two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd, the author's magnum opus. He published a revised version in 1994 under the revised subtitle, The New Biography.
Jane Elizabeth Norton was an English librarian and bibliographer, bibliographer of Edward Gibbon and editor of his correspondence.
