“Bloomsbury” was never a formal grouping. Its origins lay in male friendships in late nineteenth century Cambridge; in the early 1900s it found a focus in the Gordon Square house of the children of Leslie Stephan in unfashionable Bloomsbury; it was only with the formation of the ‘Memoir Club’ in 1920 that it loosely defined the limits of its friendships, relationships, and sympathies. The ‘Memoir Club’ originally centered on Leslie Stephen’s two daughters Virginia and Venessa, their husbands Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, and their friends and neighbors Desmond and Molly McCarthy, Duncan Grant, E.M. Foster, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes. The group was linked by what Clive Bell later called ‘a taste for discussion in pursuit of truth and a contempt for conventional ways of thinking and feeling, contempt for conventional morals if you will’. Their discussions combined tolerant agnosticism with cultural dogmatism, progressive rationality with social snobbery, practical jokes with refined self-advertisement. When in 1928 Bell attempted to define ‘Civilization’ in a book named the same, he identified an aggrandized Bloomsbury ideal in the douceur de vivre and witty iconoclasm of the France of the Enlightenment (though, as Virginia Woolf commented, ‘in the end it turns out that civilization is a lunch party at No. 50 Gordon Square’). To its friends ‘Bloomsbury’ offered a prevision of a relaxed, permissive, and elitist future; to its enemies, like the once patronized and later estranged D. H. Lawrence, it was a tight little world people by upper-middle-class ‘black beetle’.