cover image Cambridge Apostles

Cambridge Apostles

Richard Deacon. Farrar Straus Giroux, $19.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-374-11820-4

Founded in 1820, the Cambridge Conversazione Society has become better known as ""The Apostles'' from the fact that its 12 founder-members were evangelical clergymen. Although it became a secret organization and some of its adherents ``sought out drugs as devotedly as the undergraduates of the 1960s,'' the society later was dominated by Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and such other advocates of ``the higher sodomy'' as the traitors Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Among the more famous members whose careers and foibles are discussed in this gossipy history are Tennyson, Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jonathan Miller and Michael Straight. Deacon, the pseudonym of British writer Donald McCormick, has published some 50 books under one or the other of these names. Photos not seen by PW. (April)