Among the Bohemians: experiments in living 1900-1939 by Virginia Nicholson

Virginia Nicholson's peach of a subject is the generation of English artists, writers, sculptors and musicians who recreated bohemian values in Soho and Bloomsbury in the early years of the 20th century.

The most famous were Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Augustus John, Ottoline Morrell, Jacob Epstein, the Sitwells and Evelyn Waugh, but it is the less well-known who emerge as the stars of this extraordinarily rich, provocative study.

These men and women did not only live for art, but made an art of life: "not just painters and poets, but... vegetarian nature-lovers living in caravans, poseurs in velvet jackets drinking absinthe in the Café Royal, earnest lesbians in men's suits and monocles, kohl-eyed beauties in chiffon and emeralds". Among them was Arthur Ransome, 30 years later a celebrated children's author, but then a literary critic with such an interest in bohemia in London that he wrote a book called just that in 1907.

Nicholson, as daughter of Quentin Bell, a genuine child of bohemia, leads us into their lives through the kitchen door and into grimy bathrooms and chaotic bedrooms, frescoed hallways and sitting rooms papered with varnished newspaper. An addict of "the laundry-list approach to history", she is more interested in Eric Gill's tunics, Augustus John's mistresses and Roy Campbell's bouillabaisse recipe than the merits of their art.

Her substantial cast is stage-managed superbly. We gradually get to know them, from penny-pinching in chapter one ("Paying the Price") through avant-garde ideas of decoration, eating, apparel, love and child-rearing to the final "Evenings of Friendliness" that, to Cyril Connolly, were what made life worthwhile: "conversation, the only thing worth living for... that bright impermanent flower of the mind."

The book is not just good fun. It raises profound questions about our lives that need answering even more urgently now that we can all be bohemians if we fancy it, relying on state security rather than starving in a garret. At the root of the matter is Aesop's fable of the grasshopper and the ant. Do we burn our candles at both ends or achieve something more enduring?

It also raises the issue of what women really want. One of the most exciting things about bohemianism was the freedom it offered cribbed and corseted women. Many seized the chance, but, as Nicholson says, they often ended up mothering their partners' muses rather than allowing their own to emerge. Yet she rightly points out that homes such as Dora Carrington's, Nina Hammett's and Vanessa Bell's were works of art in their own right: the underprized but essential art of comfort.