Jasmine’s Reviews > Sketches In Pen and Ink > Status Update

It was that hot summer of 1911 -- when records were broken and the English became un-moral and everyone was happy and lazy if they could only do nothing in some cool place and we went in boats at night and some even bathed, so great was the heat. Once Roger produced Edward Carpenter, for whom I think he had a great admiration. (Memories of Roger Fry, p. 145)

When it is said that we did not hesitate to talk of anything, it must be understood that this was literally true. If you could say what you like about art, sex or religion, you could also talk freely and very likely dully about the ordinary doings of daily life. There was very little self-consciousness, I think, in those early gatherings, but life was exciting, terrible and amusing and we had to explore it... (p.105)

When I got into the grubby , shabby, dirty world of art students at South Kensington I wanted nothing else in the way of society. (p. 74)

I cannot remember a time when Virginia did not mean to be a writer and I a painter. It was a lucky arrangement for it meant that we went our own ways and one source of jealousy at any rate was absent. (p.63)

Nonetheless the houses in Bloomsbury were less solidly built and looked shabbier, perhaps merely because their bricks were yellow instead of read and their paint less often renewed. The skyline was lower, the streets sunnier, the neighbourhood less class-conscious. (From the Prologue by Angelica Garnett, p. 22)