Obliged to keep a detailed diary, he developed a lifelong habit of list-making, later recording his car mileage or, in great minutiae, his expenditures.He also learnt two things about efficient administration: never use two words where one will do, and always reply to letters on the day of receipt. There the person he corresponded with most was Lytton Strachey In terms of character, they were chalk and cheese. But Woolf, who went along with Strachey's high-camp stance and histrionic style, saw behind it the courageous honesty of an iconoclast in the making Woolf had a knack for describing his friends and colleagues. He filled his five-volume autobiography with memorable vignettes.But it needed a biography to bring him centre stage, to track down his Jewish background and to follow him around Ceylon as he moved from post to post in the colonial civil service. Here Christopher Ondaatje's Leonard Woolf in Ceylon (HarperCollins Canada) should be read in tandem with Glendinning, in part because his photographs enhance the tale.At 27, he became assistant government agent in Hambantota, where he was expected to collect revenue, dispense justice and travel "on circuit", frequently acting as judge.

This was at Cambridge, in rooms belonging to the Goth, as he and his friends nicknamed the girls' brother, Thoby Stephen. Even then, he was not so dazzled by their white dresses, large hats and parasols as to miss the look in their eyes. It belied demureness, for it was "a look of great intelligence, hypercritical, sarcastic, satirical".He saw Virginia only once more before disappearing to Ceylon for seven years. She acknowledges that Virginia shared in the unthinking habits of most English gentiles. But she also points out that by calling Woolf "a penniless Jew", as she often did at the time of their engagement, Virginia was "maximising the social frisson this would cause".

Marrying a Jew, Glendinning astutely observes, was part of her rebellion against the conventions in which she was raised.The first time Woolf saw her and her sister Vanessa, the beauty of the two sisters took his breath away. The tremor in his hand, which remained all his life, may have had a physiological cause but it worsened under stress. It contributed to the image Virginia Stephen retained, of "that violent, trembling misanthropic Jew".Though she became his wife, Virginia has been frequently accused of anti-Semitism. Victoria Glendinning's slant on this, as on much else in this bewitching biography, is more playful and more knowing. He lacked the "intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils" that held his friends socially in place.