Bloomsbury

Simon Heffer occasionally gets off his high Tory horse to allow something other than politics to engage him: often it is music, particularly English music, Vaughan Williams being a favourite of his; today in the Sunday Telegraph it is literature, in particular the Bloomsbury set whom he detests.
So do I, though my hate of them is not really based on having done much reading of them. I have never read a word of Virginia Wolfe; he mentions D.H.Lawrence being a memeber of this group but I don't recall that. Maybe he is putting them together because he wishes to make a point about a certain kind of writing of the period. His main thesis is that this lot were far inferior to those other writers like Wells, Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy who tended to write not about literary people but about ordinary people.
There are two "sets" of writers I really don't want to hear anything more about: the Bloomsbury lot and the Waughs. O yes, and the Coopers, though they weren't so much literary as upperclass twits who attached themselves to people they regarded as important, like Hitler and Mosely, humanity's gunge.
Unlike my dislike of Bloomsbury, based on nothing but what I have read about them rather than their works themselves, my dislike of the Waughs is based on quite a lot of reading of their work. Yet I do admire Evelyn Waugh: I enjoy his barbed wit, his style, his humour; can't say I like that semi-autobiographical novel (?) and have never wished to read Brideshead Revisted since I have the feeling that it reeks of Catholicism - not that I am anti-Catholic, it's just that Waugh (like Greene) when he gets onto the subject of his adopted religion, kind of relishes it and wallows in it and can't think straight.
In another part of the same paper today was an article about bananas; Nigfel Farndale related how, after WW2, the Waugh household received three bananas; the three children, Auberon amoung them, eagerly waited to taste these fruits they had heard were delicious but had never tried. Evelyn Waugh put three bananas on a plate, poured on cream and sugar and ate them, all three of them while his kids looked on. Farndale says that Auberon never forgave him for that.
Neither do I. A horrible man.