Bloomsbury S Outsider

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for best biography 2016 Book of the Year 2015 Sunday Times Book of the Year 2015 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2015 Evening Standard Book of the Year 2015 New Zealand Listener Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2015 Literary Sensation, Lover, Libertine, Family Man Award-winning novelist and towering figure of the 20th century British literary landscape, David Garnett was a Bloomsbury insider ultimately pushed to the margins. In this, the first biography of Garnett, (known as Bunny), author Sarah Knights – who has had unprecedented access to Garnett's papers – goes beyond stereotype and myth to present a clear sighted account of this often contradictory figure. Trained as a scientist, Garnett worked as a novelist and wrote exquisite prose. Lady into Fox was made into a Rambert ballet and Aspects of Love into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. In the First World War, he was a conscientious objector whereas in the Second he worked for British intelligence. A free love enthusiast, he nevertheless married. He loathed literary criticism but became a leading literary critic. Born into the Victorian period, Garnett's life spanned two World Wars, the Swinging Sixties and beyond. From pre-Revolutionary Russia, by way of Indian Nationalists in London and carefree Neo-Paganism, Garnett's early life was packed with adventure. Propelled by a desire to be constantly in love, he dazzled men and women, believing the person mattered, irrespective of gender. An overnight literary sensation in the 1920s he was at the centre of literary London. Confidante and mentor of many writers, T. E. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, were among his friends. Garnett felt most at home with the Bloomsbury Group, in particular with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, his lover, with whom he lived during the First World War. Their long friendship was threatened, however, when Garnett's cradle-side prophecy to marry their daughter Angelica came true. David 'Bunny' Garnett is brought to life by Ben Lloyd-Hughes and Jack Davenport in the BBC series 'Life in Squares'.

Camus' sparse parable about the human condition is one of the great stories of the 20th Century, here adapted for the stage by Booker prize winner Ben Okri. A faceless man who can no longer pretend, Mersault commits a senseless murder under the glare of the Algerian sun. On trial he feels distanced from proceedings, he is castigated for not expressing remorse, for not crying at his mother's funeral, and is forced to confront the hypocrisy and injustice of society. In an age where we are being increasingly told what to feel, The Outsider is a blast of uncompromising honesty. Albert Camus, French novelist, essayist, philosopher and Nobel laureate, was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century. Ben Okri, author of The Famished Road, is one of contemporary literature's most important writers. This adaption brings them together for a rare dramatisation of one of modern literature's most celebrated works.

Today, following the tsunami of women's protest at widespread abuse, we do more than read them; we listen and live with their astonishing bravery and eloquence.

The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group is the most comprehensive available survey of contemporary scholarship on the Bloomsbury Group – the set of influential writers, artists and thinkers whose members included Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and David Garnett. With chapters written by world leading scholars in the field, the book explores novel avenues of thinking about these pivotal figures and their works opened up by the new modernist studies. It brings together overview essays with detailed illustrative case studies, and covers topics as diverse as feminism, sexuality, empire, philosophy, class, nature and the arts. Setting the agenda for future study of Bloomsbury, this is an essential resource for scholars of 20th-century modernist culture.

Exploring how the Bloomsbury Group's cutting-edge thinkers-Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, and E. M. Forster-understood the intimacy of friends, lovers, spouses, and families as historically unfolding phenomena, this book offers a compelling account of modernism's legacies in contemporary fiction and demonstrates the myriad ways in which intimacy was a guiding and persistent idea explored by writers across the 20th-century and up to the present day. Often modernists have been celebrated for their insights into social and civilizational sickness but this book unearths a strain of modernist thought that is more complex and inspiring than this. It discusses how Bloomsbury's thinkers wrestled with the question “Does intimate life improve?” as sexual egalitarianism expands, as taboos against same-sex love, interracial love, and singlehood wane, and as parents and children relate less formally and often more warmly toward one another. And it discusses how many of today's major novelists, such as Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Rachel Cusk, look to Bloomsbury's thematic and formal examples when they reformulate this question for our time.

The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements covers key themes such as charismatic leadership, conversion and brainwashing, prophecy and millennialism, violence and suicide, gender and sexuality, legal issues, and the portrayal of New Religious Movements by the media and anti-cult organisations. Several categories of new religions receive special attention, including African new religions, Japanese new religions, Mormons, and UFO religions. This guide to New Religious Movements and their critical study brings together 29 world-class international scholars, and serves as a resource to students and researchers. The volume highlights the current state of academic study in the field, and explores areas in which future research might develop. Clearly and accessibly organised to help users quickly locate key information and analysis, the book includes an A to Z of key terms, extensive guides to further resources, a comprehensive bibliography, and a timeline of major developments in the field such as the emergence of new groups, publications, legal decisions, and historical events.

'A subtle and powerful picture of the Bloomsbury Group...S P Rosenbaum is an unparalleled interpreter of the philosophical as well as the literary traditions absorbed by this group.' Richard Ellman 'This is more detailed, more considered, more extensive, and therefore far more valuable than anything of the kind we have had before...required reading for anyone professing a serious interest in Bloomsbury.' Andrew McNellie This first volume of a three-volume study of the early literary history of the Bloomsbury Group describes the intellectual, family and Cambridge backgrounds of Bloomsbury as they are reflected in the Group's early or autobiographical works. While many books have been written on the Bloomsbury Group this is the first to study comprehensively the literary history of their interrelated achievements. Professor Rosenbaum has written a wonderful account of the ideas and people who were the early influences on the Group. He sees the modern period not as the age of 'great men', but in a new light, where original ideas about art, women and society. This book will be of interest not only to anyone fascinated by the Bloomsbury Group, but also to students of Woolf or Forster or Keynes or Strachey who need to know the background of those writers.

Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature reveals how the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts – from pests to pets, tiny insects to big game – became an integral part of their critique of modernity and conceptualisation of more-than-human worlds. Through a series of close readings, it argues that for Leonard Woolf, David Garnett, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, profound shifts in interspecies relations were intimately connected to questions of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology. Whether in their hunting narratives, zoo fictions, canine biographies or (un)entomological aesthetics, these writers repeatedly test the boundaries between, and imagine transformations of, human and nonhuman by insisting that we attend to the material contexts in which they meet. In demonstrating this, the book enrichens our understanding of British modernism while intervening in debates on the cultural significance of animality from the turn of the twentieth century to the Second World War.