Editing Bloomsbury Group (section)

==Criticism==
Early complaints focused on a perceived cliquiness: "on personal mannerisms—the favourite phrases ('ex-quisitely civilized', and 'How ''simply too'' extraordinary!'), the incredulous, weirdly emphasised Strachey voice".<ref>Lee, p. 267</ref> After World War I, as the members of the Group "began to be famous, the execration increased, and the caricature of an idle, snobbish and self-congratulatory [[Rentier capitalism|rentier class]], promoting its own brand of high culture began to take shape":<ref name="Lee p. 265" /> as Forster self-mockingly put it, "In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts".<ref>Forster, p. 65</ref>

The growing threats of the 1930s brought new criticism from younger writers of "what the last lot had done (Bloomsbury, Modernism, Eliot) in favour of what they thought of as urgent hard-hitting realism"; while "[[Wyndham Lewis]]'s ''[[The Apes of God]]'', which called Bloomsbury élitist, corrupt and talentless, caused a stir"<ref>Lee, pp. 612, 622</ref> of its own. The most telling criticism, however, came perhaps from within the Group's own ranks, when on the eve of war Keynes gave a "nostalgic and disillusioned account of the pure sweet air of G. E. Moore, that belief in undisturbed individualism, that Utopianism based on a belief in human reasonableness and decency, that refusal to accept the idea of civilisation as 'a thin and precarious crust'&nbsp;... Keynes's fond, elegiac repudiation of his "early beliefs", in the light of current affairs ("We completely misunderstood human nature, including our own")".<ref>Lee, p. 712</ref>

In his book on the background of the [[Cambridge Five|Cambridge spies]], [[Andrew Sinclair]] wrote about the Bloomsbury group: "rarely in the field of human endeavour has so much been written about so few who achieved so little".<ref>Andrew Sinclair, ''The Red and the Blue. Intelligence, Treason and the Universities'' (Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughten, U.K. 1987) {{ISBN|0-340-41687-4}}. page 33</ref> American philosopher [[Martha Nussbaum]] was quoted in 1999 as saying "I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or [[Jacques Derrida|Derrida]]".<ref name="robertboynton1">Boynton, Robert S. ''The New York Times Magazine.'' [http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=55 Who Needs Philosophy? A Profile of Martha Nussbaum] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110523173436/http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=55 |date=23 May 2011 }}</ref>

[[Raymond Williams]] saw Bloomsbury as the invention of an ageing and lonely [[Leonard Woolf]], seeking to lift himself and his friends from obscurity. To Williams, the only two so-called "members" of any significance in their respective fields were Keynes and Virginia Woolf.<ref name=":0" /> Williams unfavourably compared the Bloomsbury Group to the [[Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood]] and [[Arts and Crafts movement]], finding that the older groups were more radical and consequential.