ONE OF THE STRONGEST POINTS in J.C. Squire’s favour is the well-nigh fabulous contempt in which he was held by the liberal intelligentsia of his time. F.R. Leavis declared he was the epitome of all that was meant by the word “philistine”. Virginia Woolf reckoned that the literary circles he inhabited were home to a “stinking undergrowth of hack writers”. “Damn his eyes,” Lytton Strachey fulminated, when Squire made the mistake of complaining about the lesbian scenes in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow.
To the specimen 1920s highbrow on his upward march through the foothills of Bloomsbury, he was simply an obstruction, a moss-covered relic from the Edwardian era for
