In January 1929 Evelyn Waugh published a provocative piece in the Evening Standard entitled 'The Claim of Youth', in which he marked out five younger writers

who seem to me to sum up the aspirations and prejudices of my generation. These are, first, Harold Acton, poet and novelist; Mr Robert Byron, the art critic; Mr Christopher Hollis, the Catholic apologist; Mr Peter Quennell, poet and literary critic; and Mr Adrian Stokes, philosopher. ¹

Waugh's biographer, Martin Stannard, adds to these the names of Henry Yorke and Sacheverell Sitwell to define 'the nucleus of an alternative Bloomsbury' ² — that is to say, a nucleus differing from the intellectual circle centred on Gordon Square, London, and the key figures of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and her sister Virginia Woolf.