SOURCE: A review of Conversations in Bloomsbury, in New Statesman, Vol. 103, No. 2650, January 1, 1982, p. 21.

In the review below, Kellaway comments on Anand's recollections of the Bloomsbury Group.

When T.S. Eliot, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Arthur Waley, E.M. Forster, Clive Bell and others met Mulk Raj Anand, they little realised they were being committed to memory. Memory seems to have been a quirky editor: these conversations, recalled from the Thirties, are spare and stilted. Sometimes only the small-talk seems to have survived; sometimes a conversation about Hindu philosophy or modern art is embarked upon with unnerving speed almost before the tea has reached the table.

Mulk Raj Anand, Indian novelist and philosopher, was ambitious to discuss and contemplate, and Bloomsbury must frequently have been a disappointment to him. It is easy to sympathise both with Mulk and with T.S. Eliot when they met. Mulk Raj Anand...