Books

Lockhart's London ran from the Savoy Hotel in the Strand westward to fashionable Mayfair. At the same time another world, artistic and literary rather than political and social, flourished in the shady squares of Bloomsbury. David Gadd's The Loving Friends: A Portrait of Bloomsbury (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $6.95) is a brief but lively description of that world. Readers of Michael Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey and Quentin Bell's of Virginia Woolf will already know most of the principal inhabitants. Besides these two, there were Virginia's husband, Leonard Woolf, her sister Vanessa and Vanessa's husband, Clive Bell; Roger Fry, the art critic; Maynard Keynes, the economist: Lady Ottoline

Morrell, whose parties and weekends entertained them all, and of course Carrington, the girl who loved among others, but literally unto death the homosexual Lytton. An odd and brilliant lot, rebels against old ways and forerunners of the

new.

Gadd doesn't add much to what Holroyd and others have already done, but for introduction or summary he is first rate.