Writing in the dark

As the streetlamps flickered out and lights were obscured behind brown-paper screens, a subdued atmosphere took hold of London in 1939. Cloistered in pubs and gloomy sitting rooms, London's young writers and artists faced being sent to the front, trading their paintbrushes and pens for the weapons of war. In WRITING IN THE DARK, Will Loxley conjures up this brooding world and tells the story of the defiant magazine Horizon, which sprung up against the odds. Interweaving the personal histories of the magazine's leaders - Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and John Lehmann, with their friends and contemporaries Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and Dylan Thomas, as well as many more names both familiar and not - Will brings us into these writers' homes and into the little offices at 6 Lansdowne Terrace. WRITING IN THE DARK captures the literary life of WWII, fusing the exhausted melancholy in the aftermath of the Blitz with changes in the writers' own lives, as they moved from city to countryside, from youth to middle age.