Elders and betters

Quentin Bell provides a remarkable collection of pen portraits - of his parents Vanessa and Clive; of his aunt and uncle, Virginia and Leonard Woolf; of Roger Fry, E M Forster, Ottoline Morrell, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and many more. In writing about them he also tells the story of his own work: his employment as agricultural labourer, his career as artist and teacher of art, critic, writer, and as reluctant spokesman of Bloomsbury.