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Valentine's Rushes here. Bbc

1:19

Sounds Music Radio podcasts,

1:24

And will come to your debts. Me

1:26

the Radio for Comedy podcast the takes

1:28

history seriously my name is Greg Jenna

1:30

I'm a public is doing author and

1:32

broadcaster and for a one hundredth episode

1:34

for a party poppers in the We

1:36

offering up the order to me time

1:38

machine and traveling back a hundred years

1:40

to learn all about to extraordinary intellectuals

1:42

and creatives. The Bloomsbury Group and joining

1:45

us for our very own daughter to

1:47

be centenary are two very special guests

1:49

in History Corner. She's a poet, an

1:51

academic at the University of Glasgow which

1:53

is a reader. in english literature she's

1:55

an expert on the life and literature

1:57

of virginia woolf and is general editor

1:59

the cambridge university Press Edition of All

2:01

This Works. It's boxer Jane Goldman. Welcome,

2:03

Jane. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Well,

2:05

lovely to have you here. And in Comedy Corner,

2:07

she's a comedian, podcaster and writer. You'll have seen

2:09

her loads on the telly on

2:11

Mop the Week, The Last Leg, Live at

2:14

the Apollo and heard her loads on Radio

2:16

4 and various comedy shows, or on her

2:18

podcasts Out, Like-minded Friends and Big Kick Energy.

2:20

And you'll definitely remember her from our episode

2:22

about LGBTQ history. It's a sensational Susie Ruffall.

2:24

Welcome back, Susie. Hello. Thank you for having

2:26

me. Our 100th episode. It

2:29

feels special. It feels very special. It does indeed.

2:31

You've worn a fedora. I'm dressed as Virginia Woolf.

2:33

I hate you. No,

2:36

I'm being silly, but no, it's lovely to have you

2:38

here. And we found out last time that you didn't

2:41

love history at school, but actually you like history. Yes.

2:44

What do you know of the Bloomsbury group? Is that history you've

2:46

got in your head? I found school very

2:48

hard. And I probably mentioned this before. I'm

2:50

quite severely dyslexic. And I think that just

2:52

makes all of school difficult if you don't

2:54

have great teachers. But I do have a

2:56

general interest in history. And what do I

2:58

know about the Bloomsbury group? I

3:00

know that it was in the first half of

3:03

the 1900s. And they were

3:05

a group of sort of academics

3:07

and artists and people

3:10

that knew a lot about

3:12

stuff. I know that lots of them went to

3:14

Cambridge. And the women were

3:16

at King's. Is that

3:19

a thing? And then I know that Virginia

3:21

Woolf had a sister who was an artist. I think they were

3:23

both in it. There were lots of people that were having lots

3:26

of different relationships. So what do you know? I'm

3:34

just wondering how to go at guessing what you, our

3:37

lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I

3:39

reckon you've heard of the Bloomsbury group, much

3:41

like Susie, you might know as much as

3:43

Susie. They're also sometimes known as the Bloomsbury

3:45

set. And you may have heard of a

3:47

couple of the members, superstar novelist Virginia Woolf,

3:49

author of various books, including A Room of

3:51

One's own, Mrs. Dalloway. And perhaps you know

3:53

the novels of E.M. Forster. I've seen one

3:55

of his big or small screen adaptations, A

3:57

Passage to India, Howard's End, A Room with

3:59

a View. And if you're a

4:01

fan of progressive economics and government investment, hey,

4:03

who isn't? Then you'll know

4:05

about John Maynard Keynes and Keynesian economics.

4:08

What do we know about this gregarious group who,

4:10

according to the American writer Dorothy Parker, lived

4:13

in squares, painted in circles and

4:15

loved in triangles? Let's

4:17

find out. Right, this

4:20

is the 100th episode of Your Dead To Me. We're all very chuffed. We

4:23

thought it would be fun to jump back to 1924 to go back 100 years. Then

4:26

we realised that's actually not going to work because

4:28

their life sprawls over three decades. So we've abandoned

4:31

that plan. We're just doing the Bloomsbury group. But

4:33

Susie, we're going to take you to 1915. I

4:36

imagine you've been to plenty of cool London parties in the

4:38

21st century. Hey, listen, Greg, it's true. I'm

4:40

kind of cool. So

4:43

what are you imagining as a 1915 cool London

4:45

party? What is the vibe, do you think? So

4:48

I'm thinking, have you seen that Stephen Fryfield bright young thing? Mm-hmm.

4:51

Is that kind of the vibe? I don't know if that's the

4:53

right period at all, but I feel like, would it be flappers?

4:55

No, is that the wrong period? Kind of, a bit early. 1915

4:57

is during the First World War. First

5:00

World War. A little bit before the flappers. OK, so

5:02

we're keeping the home fires burning. We're

5:04

crying, the Titanic's just sunk. People are wearing

5:07

those sorts of things. People are talking about

5:09

the unthinkable Molly Brown. Rose

5:12

is still alive, Jack's very much dead. Is

5:14

that good? Is that good? I

5:17

mean, I'm sure they're good guesses. I mean, they're

5:19

joining us. Jane, this party was thrown by the

5:21

brilliantly named Lady Otiline Morrell. So

5:24

this is 25th of March, 1915, Lady Otiline

5:26

Morrell's house. What is it about this

5:28

party that sums up the Bloomsbury group? Otiline

5:30

Morrell hosted weekly revels in

5:33

her Bloomsbury home against the

5:35

war, supporting conscientious

5:37

objectors and pacifists.

5:41

Writer Arnold Bennett's diary

5:43

entry for the 25th of March, 1915, talks

5:47

about the festivities that began

5:49

with a radical art exhibition

5:52

before moving to the Morrells, I

5:55

quote, gathering of an

5:57

immense reunion of art students.

6:00

Rangers and queer people.

6:03

Girls in fancy mail

6:05

costumes, queer dancing, etc.

6:08

Fine pitches, glorious. Drawings

6:10

by Picasso. excellent.

6:13

Impression of host and hostess Us

6:15

when he says in his diary

6:17

well mean that sounds like quite

6:19

a shindig. Yet really does know Bloomsbury

6:21

at that period of blues reno it's of

6:23

quite. Is. Our market my easy then

6:26

would it has been know it was a

6:28

dump on it when I met a guy.

6:30

It will. It wasn't the place the

6:32

young ladies to really live even though

6:34

they were worth. Well. See right? They

6:37

were all wealthy to a degree. Yeah yeah.

6:39

But. Susie. There was a very

6:41

important lexicographical. Landmark. In

6:43

that diary entry, don't I guess I was

6:46

in. Have to start with what lexigrams us.

6:48

Let me in terms of linguistic Harris's in

6:50

his shows. with words used in that diary

6:52

entry by On Bennett, that's really important to

6:55

know what the word was. Clear.

6:57

He i was days is the first

6:59

of a use of that in publish

7:02

writing, right? It's the mean. Unusual

7:04

know to mean a

7:06

Sexual Orientations The Oxford

7:09

English Dictionary site sony.

7:11

Bennett's term queer in

7:13

this diary entry as

7:15

the earliest published. Modern usage

7:17

of the word Queer. But.

7:20

Also was clear from Bennett's diary

7:22

entries is that Bloomsbury was already

7:24

synonymous with queer and Bloomsbury and

7:27

sex work synonymous from they champions

7:29

at the same time avant garde

7:32

European art and that own Bloomsbury

7:34

style assault or it's a Cz.

7:36

During this episode, we are gonna

7:39

be bombarding you with very complicated

7:41

personal relations between people. Goods are

7:44

we thought we'd actually help you

7:46

navigate that by printing off a

7:48

kind of relationship map. Yes, I hope

7:50

he's in front of you. On a

7:53

fantastic persist in Maryland has put this together.

7:55

It is a sort of Elwood styles. As

7:57

they say, this is. Mam

7:59

A routine. I said on the L word I'd feel

8:01

like I do a lot more. Obviously you

8:03

look about the dynamics of being Carmen and Shane until

8:05

the cows come home. Yeah. But... You

8:09

can see that it's going to get quite messy as we

8:11

go. Yes. So this is your life

8:13

raft. This can't be

8:15

my life raft. It's far too confusing. Now

8:19

although we've said the Bloomsbury group is based around Bloomsbury,

8:21

which I think is entirely fair, Cambridge.

8:24

How does Cambridge sort of predate

8:26

Bloomsbury? Partly it began at the

8:28

turn of the 20th century when

8:31

Toby Seven, Virginia Woolf and

8:33

Vanessa Bell's brother, went to

8:35

Cambridge University. At

8:37

Cambridge Toby hung out with

8:40

a secret all-male elite intellectual

8:42

conversation group, the Cambridge... Oh

8:44

God. They were... I couldn't

8:46

think of anything like that. Go on. Oh

8:49

no. You might be

8:51

pleasantly surprised. Fans of

8:53

philosopher G.E. Moore and

8:56

he recommended the pleasures

8:59

of human intercourse and

9:02

the admiration of beautiful

9:04

objects. And I think

9:06

some of the Bloomsbury group took

9:08

that intercourse quite literally. Yes. The

9:11

pleasures were Clive Bell,

9:13

Leonard Woolf, Lytton Straitchey,

9:15

Toby Seven, Adrian Seven,

9:18

E.M. Forster and John Maynard

9:21

Keynes. But they also pulled

9:23

in Lytton Straitchey's handsome Scottish

9:26

cousin, Duncan Grant, who was at

9:28

art college at the time. So

9:31

these are our fancy nerds. Sure. And they're

9:33

all having a good time. They

9:35

are a member of this secret organisation called

9:38

the Cambridge Apostles. Quite obscure. And on the

9:40

5th of May 1901, they wrestled with the

9:42

eternal question, Susie. The big one we've all

9:44

asked. Are crocodiles the best of

9:46

animals? No. I'm pleased

9:49

you've had this chat and I'm pleased you've invited me in for it. Now,

9:51

can I ask a quick question? Would all of

9:53

these men have been... I'm not suggesting they

9:56

were elitists, but they would all have been from wealth to a degree. So

9:58

go to Cambridge at that time. Short answer,

10:00

yes. They would all expect sort of

10:03

positions of administration in the Empire and

10:05

lots of them went to Eaton then

10:07

Cambridge and But some

10:09

of them were also anti-imperialists,

10:11

right? Yeah It

10:14

is referred to as the

10:16

the Bloomsbury fraction by Raymond

10:18

Williams The idea that some

10:20

of the elite turns against itself. So

10:22

a lot of Virginia Woolf's work is

10:24

about Looking at

10:26

how people are inducted into a

10:28

system that they know is wrong.

10:30

Okay, so we've introduced Toby Steven

10:32

I'll be honest Jane. I've never

10:35

heard of him, but the older

10:37

brother of Virginia and Vanessa Yeah,

10:39

well poor Toby died such a

10:41

young but he's responsible for Moving

10:44

himself and his siblings out to

10:46

Bloomsbury from the posh house that

10:48

they'd lived in It's

10:50

there that Toby began hosting

10:52

Thursday evenings to keep up conversation

10:55

or intercourse with his

10:57

Cambridge friends And

11:00

this was radical because now

11:02

it included women with a

11:04

radical openness and no taboos

11:06

to the conversation So

11:08

then his sister Vanessa began the

11:10

Friday Club in 1905 Focusing

11:14

on visual art but covering all the

11:16

same loose topics as well I guess

11:19

we should start with the writers because

11:21

that's the Thursday gang. Have you heard of him Foster?

11:23

I have yeah So I knew that he was a

11:26

writer. Mm-hmm. But I know that he was gay.

11:28

Yeah, do you write about India? Did you travel a

11:30

lot? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what that's it. Yeah,

11:32

that's good summary Jane Do you want to give

11:34

us a bit more detail? Well, he was born in

11:36

London in 1879

11:39

and he was baptized Edward

11:41

Morgan Foster avoiding

11:43

being baptized Henry because

11:45

his dad accidentally gave his own name

11:47

to the vicar I

11:49

love that at Cambridge Foster

11:52

was massively influenced by the

11:54

openly gay and feminist Edward

11:57

Carpenter Forster too was gay

12:00

And the greatest love of

12:02

E.M. Forster's life was Bob

12:04

Buckingham, a burly

12:06

young policeman, whom

12:08

he met in 1930. And

12:11

despite Buckingham's marriage, at which

12:13

Forster was a witness, their

12:16

relationship flourished for years. Yeah.

12:19

Was he writing about queer stuff? Or was it like coded?

12:22

No, so this is a great question, Susie. This is

12:24

coded. But there is a

12:26

very famous, an important book of his called...

12:28

is it Morris or Maurice? Yeah. So

12:31

basically, he published between 1905 and

12:34

1910, four novels, but

12:37

he finished this book Maurice in 1914.

12:40

However, it was only published posthumously

12:42

a year after he died in 1971,

12:44

because it's about

12:47

a gay relationship with what

12:49

he called an imperative happy

12:52

ending. So Forster wrote

12:54

about this, I was determined

12:56

that in fiction, anyway,

12:59

two men should fall in love

13:01

and remain in it for the

13:03

ever and ever that fiction allows.

13:06

We get such a trope of the

13:08

bury your gaze trope, where LGBTQ stories

13:10

often end with tragedy. And

13:12

he was sort of saying it's imperative that this one is

13:15

happy ever after. And that's something that still happens now.

13:18

There's the cliche of killing off lesbians. It's

13:20

very common. Another person we

13:23

have to talk about is John Maynard Keynes

13:25

and your relationship map, Susie, you

13:27

will probably see there's quite a lot going

13:29

on between John Maynard Keynes, Lydon Straitschy and

13:31

Duncan Grant. Yeah, he's quite busy. Yeah.

13:35

So he is this sort of great genius economist. Jane,

13:37

do you want to give us sort of the brief

13:40

press? Okay, born in 1883, who's

13:42

educated at Eaton and Cambridge,

13:45

an economics and maths genius, whom

13:48

his school banned from

13:50

maths competitions because it was unfair

13:52

on the other kids. His

13:54

major work, General Theory of Employment,

13:57

Interest and Money, nice loop banger.

14:00

Brilliant. Challenged classical economic

14:03

theories arguing for government

14:05

intervention as necessary

14:08

to stabilize economies during

14:10

recessions. It had a

14:12

profound impact on economic thought and

14:15

policy until about 1979 when Margaret Thatcher

14:18

came in and supposedly burned a copy

14:21

of Keynes on Downing

14:23

Street steps. That's probably not true but

14:25

people say it's a good story. Let

14:28

me just get this right. It had been all

14:30

for nationalised stuff.

14:33

He's not a

14:35

capitalist but he thinks that there's

14:37

more to life, going back to

14:39

those Cambridge conversations, pleasure,

14:41

beautiful things, everybody deserves that.

14:44

The economics is a fiction and

14:47

you can intervene and restructure. He

14:49

basically believes government is there for a purpose

14:52

to serve the people. Well,

14:54

it seems like a wild idea given our

14:56

character. Let's

14:59

now move on to the visual artists. Can

15:01

we have a punnet of Bloomsbury's who do

15:03

art please, Jane? Okay, let's

15:05

start with Vanessa Stevens, sister of Virginia,

15:07

born 1879, studied at Arthur Cope

15:12

School of Art from 1896, also

15:16

attended King's College London like

15:18

a sister for a while and

15:20

the Royal Academy School from 1901. Three

15:24

years after moving to Bloomsbury with

15:26

her siblings, she married her brother's

15:29

friend, the art critic Clive

15:31

Bell, who doesn't seem to

15:33

have been bisexual, unusually, and

15:35

they got married in 1907. Clive

15:39

was a huge Francophile and

15:42

he went on to have a lifelong friendship

15:44

with Picasso. You

15:46

know, so they were very well connected with

15:48

all the major European artists. Would those

15:50

artists have been massive at that point?

15:53

They were superstars by then. And

15:55

Vanessa, initially inspired by

15:58

New English Art, had her head

16:01

turned by the 1910 Post-Impressionist

16:03

exhibition, which was

16:05

showing continental works by Manet,

16:08

Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, all

16:10

by then dead, but absolutely

16:12

shocking to the British public and

16:15

the critics. And they

16:17

were shown alongside living modern French

16:19

artists. Her own avant-garde

16:21

paintings and collages were

16:24

then shown in the second Post-Impressionist

16:26

exhibition in 1912. Vanessa

16:30

Bell showed work alongside other

16:32

Bloomsbury's like Duncan Grant, Roger

16:34

Frye, and Wyndham Lewis, who

16:37

was originally in Bloomsbury, but fell

16:39

out with them over the Ideal

16:41

Home Exhibition and then wrote

16:43

really nasty things about them. Yeah. Yeah. The Ideal

16:45

Home Exhibition nowadays is where you go to buy,

16:48

like, tin opuses and sort of... And, like, you

16:50

know, get a discount on a safe place. Yeah,

16:53

back then it was like the cutting edge of thinking

16:55

about, like, domestic aesthetics. Right.

16:57

Yeah. Vanessa Bell's artwork

17:00

became increasingly bold and

17:02

experimental, and she's

17:04

actually credited after Frantisek Coupeka

17:07

with one of the earliest

17:10

totally abstract paintings in Europe.

17:12

And people would have been stunned by them in

17:15

a way. Yes, Fandor, very angry. Yeah. Because they

17:17

would have thought, this is an art, because I

17:19

can't see a picture in it. Yeah, exactly.

17:21

Yeah. Exactly. And would it be more about

17:23

what it made you feel? Exactly.

17:26

Exactly. Rather than, oh, that's a house. It's...

17:28

Yeah. Oh, I feel angry. Ha ha ha

17:31

ha. Vanessa Bell is

17:33

obviously an unconventional person in terms of

17:35

her art. She's also going to have an

17:37

unconventional marriage because that's what they

17:39

do. They had two sons, Julian

17:41

and Quentin. Meanwhile, I

17:44

think when Vanessa was very

17:46

heavily into early motherhood, Clive

17:49

had a very serious flirtation

17:51

with her sister, Virginia. Oh,

17:53

no. He was soon

17:56

off with other women. The Bells remained

17:58

married, but both had... significant

18:00

relationships with other people. Between

18:03

1911 and 1913, Vanessa had a serious relationship

18:07

with the artist critic Roger Fry.

18:09

In 1913, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan

18:14

Grant founded the Amiga

18:17

workshops based in Fitzroy

18:19

Square. Artists could exhibit

18:21

and sell their works in this

18:23

space, which was designed to explore

18:26

new forms and media, including

18:28

tarting up old furniture.

18:31

Vanessa and Duncan experimented

18:34

there with textiles, pottery,

18:36

furniture and kinetic

18:38

art. So Roger Fry

18:40

and Vanessa Bell have a

18:42

relationship, break up and then

18:44

found a workshop together. Fantastic.

18:46

Can you imagine setting up with an X? It's

18:48

got to be pretty chill. They would be selling

18:50

much, as they would be arguing a lot. So

18:53

Vanessa Bell

18:55

not only having a relationship with

18:58

Fry, not only setting up the

19:00

Omega workshops, she also was involved

19:02

with Duncan Grant, who was also

19:05

involved with Keynes and Litton Strake. I

19:07

mean, Vanessa Bell has a daughter

19:11

with Duncan Grant and she's called Angelica Bell,

19:14

not the BBC TVC children

19:16

presenter. She's lovely. Angelica Bell,

19:18

who's raised as Clive's daughter,

19:20

even though it's Duncan's daughter. That's right. And

19:23

she didn't know until she was, I think

19:25

18, the real

19:27

father was. But also

19:29

we've since discovered this big

19:31

stash of Grant's more queer

19:33

erotic art. And he's

19:35

now known as a queer artist of

19:37

some import. And he left a substantial

19:40

body of work exploring

19:42

queer sexuality, i.e. loads

19:44

of male nudes. Sure. All stashed

19:46

under the bed. Wow. Okay,

19:50

so we've mentioned the Stephen

19:52

siblings, Toby, Vanessa, Adrian, who

19:54

of course, you know, our sister to Virginia.

19:58

So I think Virginia Woolf is probably with

20:00

the most famous blooms berry. So tell us

20:02

about her then. Her dad Leslie

20:04

Stevens founding editor of the Dictionary

20:07

of National Biography and he

20:09

came from a long line of important

20:11

social reformers and abolitionists. Virginia

20:14

Woolf was homeschooled as a child and

20:16

then she attended as you rightly said

20:18

King's College London the Ladies Department 1897

20:20

to 1901. After Toby's

20:25

death and Vanessa's marriage Virginia

20:27

and Adrian moved to 29

20:29

Fitzroy Square and

20:31

it was there that Virginia began

20:33

her first novel and they entertained

20:37

Bloomsbury friends. Virginia Woolf

20:39

married Leonard Woolf and

20:41

he was from a Jewish family. His

20:44

father was a lawyer, he became a

20:46

civil servant, you know sort of classic

20:48

Empire man. Yeah Leonard first met Virginia

20:50

in 1903 but then he was

20:53

off in Ceylon Sri Lanka. And

20:56

he's quite he's an interesting guy because he's

20:58

sort of a socialist. He's quite radical getting

21:00

involved in other literature and printing and The

21:02

Wasteland I think he helps out doesn't he

21:04

Jane? Yeah well they got married in

21:06

1912 but Leonard and Virginia in 1917

21:09

founded their own

21:11

press called the Hogarth Press. They

21:13

did hand printed books as you said

21:16

including Virginia Woolf set the type

21:18

for T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland when

21:20

it was Oh wow she's the typesetter.

21:22

Yeah she personally was the typesetter. As

21:25

importantly she helped Leonard with

21:27

his most important anti-imperialist work

21:29

which is called Empire and

21:31

Commerce in Africa published in

21:33

1920. Now she confessed to

21:35

received ingrained

21:40

and continuing anti-Semitism

21:43

and snobbery and she said

21:45

later how I hated

21:47

marrying a Jew what a

21:49

snob I was. She was born

21:52

an anti-semite but maybe she changes

21:54

her views. There's a lot of

21:56

anti-semitic utterances in her

21:58

diaries and letters however. Yeah,

22:00

and they had a happy marriage. A very

22:02

long and happy marriage. However,

22:04

she also once confessed feeling

22:06

no physical attraction to him.

22:09

She also defined herself as a

22:11

kind of attracted to men and

22:14

women, including once she

22:16

said about a later girlfriend that

22:18

she felt desire for Ethel Smythe,

22:21

suffragist composer. Yeah, because I think the

22:23

Ginny Wolf is often publicly

22:25

described by people as sort of

22:27

neurotic and sexless, which

22:29

actually really is not true of her youth.

22:32

Do you want to guess what the nickname

22:34

that Virginia was given by her sister? It

22:36

was an animalistic nickname. She had a bit

22:39

of a dog. Yeah. Like a dirty dog.

22:41

The nickname was Goat. Greatest of

22:43

all time. Goat as in Billy Goat,

22:45

as in Horny, Randy. Oh! Yeah,

22:47

she would chat people up on the train, women on the train. I

22:50

mean, good for her. I think,

22:52

listen, I love a journey on a

22:55

train. Right. And, you

22:57

know, I'm a notorious lesbian. So, you

22:59

know, I support all those things. Her

23:01

best, most well-known love affair began

23:03

in 1925 with the aristocrat

23:06

and author Vita Sackville West.

23:08

Yes. Virginia Wolf didn't rate

23:10

her poetry, but loved her long legs.

23:14

And so Alex. Yeah,

23:16

and we've also got this

23:18

amazing knoll dedicated to Vita

23:20

called Orlando. Right. Have you

23:22

heard of Orlando? I've heard of Orlando. What do

23:24

you know? Then it's a bit lezzy. Is

23:27

that fair? Yeah,

23:29

it is. Broadly lezzy. OK. It

23:32

was published Orlando, a biography, 1928. It's

23:36

Wolf's brilliant queer love letter

23:39

to Vita Sackville West. And

23:42

it's the life of this cross-dressing

23:44

polyamorous Elizabethan noble

23:46

man. And he

23:48

doesn't age or die, but he wakes

23:50

up one day as a

23:52

woman in Constantinople in

23:55

the 18th century. And

23:57

then she continues. life

24:00

of cross-dressing polyamory as

24:03

a woman into the 20th century and on

24:05

the last page it says October 1928,

24:08

the day the book is published. Do

24:11

they publish their own works? They

24:13

have like a publishing house? Yeah

24:15

that's right, the whole goth press.

24:17

So once Virginia Woolf was able

24:19

to take hold of the means

24:21

of production then she had the

24:23

freedom. So with Jacob's room, Mrs.

24:25

Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves

24:27

and Between the Acts, they were

24:29

all published by the Hogarth Press

24:31

and that way she had control.

24:33

A publishing house of one loan? Yeah very

24:35

good. Then they published

24:37

All Their Maids but then they

24:39

also published, I mean the major

24:41

works of Freud for the first

24:43

time in English, Gertrude Stein, you

24:46

name it. She also published two

24:48

major feminist manifestos which should be on your reading

24:50

list, A Room of One's Own in 1929 and

24:53

Three Guinea's 1938. Several

24:56

volumes worth of essays and short

24:58

stories and her posthumously

25:01

published masses of volumes of

25:03

letters and diaries, they're riveting

25:05

reading, riveting. All

25:08

right so we've met the Bloomsberries as they

25:10

call themselves. What are your sort of overarching

25:12

feelings having bombarded you with all this information

25:14

before we get to the nuance window? Well

25:17

just that they were massive

25:19

change makers. You know

25:21

a lot of what they did influenced where

25:24

we are today. Certainly a lot of their

25:26

free thinking and unapologetic

25:28

queerness is certainly something

25:30

that needs to be celebrated and

25:32

feels enormously hopeful but you know

25:34

when you look at people throughout

25:36

history you also have to accept

25:38

things about them that you don't like as

25:41

well. The nuance window! At

25:48

this time we get to our nuance window. This

25:50

is part of the show where Susie and I

25:52

relax in Lady Morell's salon with our pianola. Well

25:55

Dr Jane tells us something we need to know

25:57

about the Bloomsbury group so my stopwatch is ready

25:59

Jane. You have two minutes, take it

26:01

away please. But, you

26:03

may say, what happened

26:06

in December 1910 to make

26:09

Virginia Woolf say on

26:11

or about December 1910

26:13

human character changed? New

26:16

King? Government crisis

26:18

over Irish Home Rule? Bonfire

26:20

Night was Bloomsbury's in 1910.

26:24

This impressionism's explosion of

26:27

colour got rid

26:29

of chiaroscuro, art's

26:32

old binary casting of dark

26:34

and shade. Now

26:36

it's fireworks, this new

26:39

prismatic chiaroscuro, this violent

26:41

rapture of colour. Bloomsbury's

26:44

stops a seeing in binary, light,

26:47

dark, white, black, male, female,

26:49

master, slave.

26:51

Bloomsbury's vibrating prismatics is

26:54

a new queer way of seeing. In

26:57

1910, outraged critics feared this

27:00

art would Gogonize

27:02

the European landscape,

27:05

Gogonize the Aryan race. These

27:07

are quotes. This

27:09

unpatriotic campaign of anarchism,

27:12

evil plague, sickening

27:15

aberrations, mania for

27:17

painting flesh with mud,

27:19

making Eve's fair daughters

27:22

look unwashed. Now

27:24

outside on the streets comes

27:27

Black Friday, November 1910. Thousands

27:31

of suffragettes, purple,

27:33

white, green, peaceful

27:35

women demonstrators met

27:38

with police brutality and

27:40

mass arrest. Virginia

27:42

Woolf attended their Albert Hall

27:45

rally, November 1910. Woolf's

27:49

1940 essay, Thoughts

27:52

of Peace in an Air

27:54

Raid, says it all. Thank

27:57

you. Thank you so much, Jane. Fantastic. Yeah,

28:00

fascinating people. So there

28:02

we go, the Bloomsbury Group. I'd just like to say

28:04

a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner.

28:06

We had the fantastic Dr Jane Goldmans from the University

28:09

of Glasgow. Thank you, Jane. Thank

28:11

you. It's been an absolute pleasure and

28:13

an education. And

28:15

in Comedy Corner, we had the superb Susie Ruffell. Thank

28:17

you, Susie. Thank you for having me. I've learned a

28:19

lot and now I've got a very big reading list.

28:21

And to you lovely listener, join me next time as

28:24

we drop in on another historical group of go-getters. But

28:26

for now, I must go and debate crocodiles with my

28:28

four-year-old. Bye! Why

28:37

do some of the brands we love most

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hit dizzy heights but then ultimately end up

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toast? I'm Sean Farrington,

28:43

presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series,

28:46

Toast, which unpicks what went wrong with

28:48

big business ideas and examines why they

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were so popular in the first place.

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We hear from people directly involved in

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building a brand's fortunes. Everybody still wanted

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opportunity to try and make that happen.

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We were really, really excited about what

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lot of people saying that Twitter is

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