Non Fiction
ISBN: 9781854115263
Publication date: November 15, 2010
Price: £9.99
Out of stock
“His (Murray) amiably informative and well-illustrated book is the ideal companion to any tour.” The Independent
Birthplace of Christian Socialism. Site of the British Museum, University College, RADA, the Friends House, the BMA, Great Ormond Street Hospital. Bloomsbury is crammed with history and with contemporary decision-making. But there is also working class Bloomsbury and, now, Bengali Bloomsbury in the east.
Biographer and novelist Nicholas Murray walks this crowded square mile or so, among the locals, the students, the tourists, alone or in the company of local characters, to give Bloomsbury the ‘Real’ series treatment of history, memoir, ‘psychogeography’ and oblique approaches to the familiar. His entertaining and informative text is accompanied by equally oblique images, the sort you won’t find in either tourist guides or regular history books. All of which present Bloomsbury as it’s never been portrayed before: intimate, contemporary, exploratory and occasionally downright strange.
Nicholas Murray
Nicholas Murray is a poet and literary biographer living in Powys. He wrote the first biography of Bruce Chatwin, published by Seren, which was followed by lives of Matthew Arnold, Aldous Huxley, Andrew Marvell and Franz Kafka and biographical studies of the WW1 poets and the nineteenth century British travellers, then latter being re-issued in 2027 by Eland. Two works of fiction, a book on borders and Real Bloomsbury have all been published by Seren. He has published three books of poetry including Elsewhere: Collected Poems in 2022 and over a dozen poetry pamphlets. He won the Basil Bunting Prize in 2015 and is co-publisher of the award-winning Powys-based poetry pamphlet imprint Rack Press. He has enjoyed collaborating as a poet with the Sage Dance Company at the Bloomsbury Festival and with other composers. His 2016 book on borders, Crossings inspired a string quartet by Cheryl Frances Hoad premiered at the Presteigne Festival and he writes the Free Range Writing Substack. His Instagram account is @rackpress. His freelance reviews and essays have appeared in the TLS, LRB, Guardian, Independent, Literary Review, Slightly Foxed, Planet, New Welsh Review and many others. He is currently Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University.
