David Trotter

Gertrude​ Trevelyan lived the Virginia Woolf dream: £500 a year and a room of one’s own in which to write experimental novels. Born in 1903 into a well-to-do West Country family, she was a student at Lady Margaret Hall, graduating in 1927. After Oxford, she moved to London, and in 1931 into a flat at 107 Lansdowne Road, Notting Hill. There’s a rare sighting of her, a...

Preston Sturges​ died in August 1959, when Donald Trump was thirteen years old. So it’s not his fault that the uses to which the grandiose Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach has more recently been put include the development of a club of which Jeffrey Epstein was briefly a member, as well as an impromptu storage facility for state secrets. But he did rather like the atmosphere of the...

‘Shall​ we never again talk together in laconic?’ Joseph Addison once wrote to Jonathan Swift, by way of inviting him to dinner the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with...

Andrea Arnold​ is best known as a director of films about young working-class women determined to get some joy out of a life that has been shaped by the needs and desires of others (not all of them men). By the time we meet these women, it’s generally too late for introductions. Someone, it seems, has gone ballistic. The films duly drop us in mid-rampage. People don’t just leave...

On 2​ january 1931, Valentine Ackland sent her new lover, Sylvia Townsend Warner, a book about bisexuality. ‘After reading it carefully,’ she reported with evident relief, ‘I discover that you and I are admirably suited to each other.’ Warner was quick to imagine bisexuality as a kind of physiological oscillation. ‘Do we do it in alternate spasms, do you think, like synchronised oysters ... or is one both at once?’ The book’s author, Theodore J. Faithfull, described on the title page as ‘principal of the Priory Gate School’, had something altogether less strenuous in mind. To him, bisexuality did not concern sexual preference. Rather, it was a way to acknowledge the bipolar presence in an individual of the ‘attributes, instincts and desires generally attributed to males and females respectively’. One is bisexual psychologically, Ackland explained. She was the sort of person whose ‘psychological sexual balance’, in Faithfull’s terms, demanded the frequent ‘discharge of libido’. When it came to libido, others might prefer to ‘receive’ and ‘retain’ rather than to discharge. By Ackland’s account, Warner belonged to the second category.