A NEW television series which started on Monday is bound to bring more tourists to several sites in East Sussex.

Life in Squares chronicles the liberal and bohemian lives of the Bloomsbury group which included experimenting in the arts and a great deal of bed hopping.

Curiously enough there is not much to see of them in the parts of London near the British Museum where the group and the TV series took their names.

But both Charleston House near Firle, where many members of the group congregated, and Monk’s House in Rodmell, home of Virginia Woolf, are open to the public.

Public interest in the Bloomsbury group has steadily grown in the past half century to the extent where it has become much more than a cottage industry.

In the 1960s when he was an old man, Virginia’s husband Leonard used to answer questions about the group from students and academics in his own hand. Now he would need a team of researchers.

Yet it is sometimes hard to pinpoint the reasons why this collection of artists and writers should now be fascinating to so many people.

There was undoubted enormous talent in the fringe members of the group, such as the austere poet TS Eliot or the author EM Forster.

Eliot was probably the foremost poet of the last century while Forster produced only five novels during his long life, but they included Howard’s End and A Passage to India.

The economist John Maynard Keynes was without question a major financial figure during his short life and a fascinating, complex character. His book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, produced in 1919, was largely written at Charleston.

But the paintings that survive of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell are distinctly underwhelming to me every time I visit the fine old farmhouse.

Many people head for Berwick Church near Charleston to see decorations the Bloomsberries undertook during the Second World War but to me their daubs amount to desecration.

The novels of Virginia Woolf have generally not worn well and reading To the Lighthouse is for most people something of a struggle. Only her diaries show her interest in other people and her way with words.

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey was reckoned in the 1920s to have brought an invigorating change to biography by making it frank and controversial.

Yet when I reread the book this year, I found it poor and plodding with both the subjects and the style of writing distinctly lacklustre.

There is a macabre interest in Virginia Woolf’s suicide with many people walking the route she took to the River Ouse where she drowned, weighed down by stones in her coat pockets.

But this was the sorry end to a life dominated by mental illness and it was really only Leonard’s steadiness and devotion that enabled her to live as long as she did.

Looking at the lives of most group members, it is hard to escape the conclusion that they were self-indulgent and frequently selfish.

They espoused liberal causes yet led lives of privilege which included hiring servants to do the drudgery, often treating them badly.

The amount of time and money they had was denied to most ordinary people who found life a relentless struggle.

Many members of the group were ahead of their time in sexual experimentation and their welcoming of homosexuality. But it did not necessarily make them happy and had a profound effect on most of their children.

Only a few of them had their feet firmly planted on the ground so that they could understand how the rest of the world worked.

As any visitor to Monk’s House will observe, Leonard Woolf was a keen plantsman and the garden is much grander than the house.

He was prouder of coming second in one category of the Rodmell horticultural show than he was in the many literary awards he was offered for his work.

Keynes changed the way in which nations approached economics and also undertook an enormous task during and after the Second World War in trying to gain American financial support for Britain.

He managed it but it killed him and he was one of the few figures to have had the honour of a national memorial service – attended by both his parents.

Keynes thought a lot about the future and even wrote a tract called The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

But asked to be more definite, he would only say: “In the long run we are all dead.”

Life in Squares with its top-class cast and attention to period detail will undoubtedly make the Bloomsbury set seem glamorous and groundbreaking.

Those exploring more thoroughly will often become progressively dis-appointed the deeper they delve.