Bloomsberries at war PAUL BAILEY Writing in the Dark: Bloomsbury, the Blitz, and Horizon Magazine

Bloomsbury £20

The subtitle of Will Loxley’s first book does not sound especially adventurous or challenging.

Haven’t we, both readers and writers, been here before? It’s not entirely fanciful to imagine a bookshop that sells nothing but biographies, critical studies and essays on the subject of the Bloomsbury Group alone.

Then there’s the work they wrote and painted themselves – some of it lastingly important, like the best novels of Virginia Woolf, or little more than decorative, as is, while the literary aspects of life in London during the German invasion have been accounted for recently in Lara Feigel’s highly original .