These highly original essays illuminate Virginia Woolf and a selection of other twentieth-century writers and artists. Based on detailed research and presenting previously unpublished texts, pictures, and photographs, they are notable feats of scholarly detective work. Six of them focus on four pivotal members of the Bloomsbury Group - Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry. Prominent ingredients of their story include art, writing, friendship, love, sex, mental illness, and Greek travel. The five 'out of Bloomsbury' essays are about the 'new' letters from the novelist Rose Macaulay to the Irish poet Katharine Tynan; the prodigious teenage talents of Dorothy L. Sayers; the remarkable story of Tolkien's schoolmaster R. W. Reynolds; and the artist Tristram Hillier in Portugal. The collection creates a richly varied and entertaining picture of British culture in the first half of the twentieth century. -- .

Martin Ferguson Smith's work on Lucretius is both well known and highly regarded. However, his 1969 translation of De Rerum Natura --long out of print--is virtually unknown. Readers will share our excitement in the discovery of this accurate and fluent prose rendering. For this edition, Professor Smith provides a revised translation, new Introduction, headnotes and bibliography.

These highly original essays illuminate Virginia Woolf and a selection of other twentieth-century writers and artists. Based on detailed research and presenting previously unpublished texts, pictures, and photographs, they are notable feats of scholarly detective work. Six of them focus on four pivotal members of the Bloomsbury Group – Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry. Prominent ingredients of their story include art, writing, friendship, love, sex, mental illness, and Greek travel. The five ‘out of Bloomsbury’ essays are about the ‘new’ letters from the novelist Rose Macaulay to the Irish poet Katharine Tynan; the prodigious teenage talents of Dorothy L. Sayers; the remarkable story of Tolkien’s schoolmaster R. W. Reynolds; and the artist Tristram Hillier in Portugal. The collection creates a richly varied and entertaining picture of British culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Longlisted for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2022 -- .

This fascinating book presents the �rst biography of Helen Coombe, a woman admired not only for her artistic skill, but also for her intellect, personality and wit. It reveals her family background and education, her place in the Arts and Crafts Movement and her outstanding artistic output.

Martin Ferguson Smith's work on Lucretius is both well known and highly regarded. However, his 1969 translation of De Rerum Natura --long out of print--is virtually unknown. Readers will share our excitement in the discovery of this accurate and fluent prose rendering. For this edition, Professor Smith provides a revised translation, new Introduction, headnotes and bibliography.

Madeleine Symons (1895-1957) was a brilliantly effective women's trade union officer during and after the First World War. In years when she was still not qualified to vote, she served on the executive committee of the Labour Party, as a Justice of the Peace, and on a Royal Commission. Her union career was abruptly ended in 1926 by pregnancy and unmarried motherhood. Later she worked tirelessly as a juvenile magistrate in London and for social justice and penal reform everywhere. Her story, told for the first time on the sixtieth anniversary of her death, is of historical and human interest and has lessons for society today.