Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Author, Musician, Artist

  Welcome to the History of True Love Romance at Mills and Swoon. Tonight’s story takes us to the salons and drawing rooms of early twentieth-century London, where literature, art, and scandal often mingled freely among the cleverest minds of the age. It was here, in the unconventional world of the Bloomsbury Group, that one of the most intriguing love affairs in literary history unfolded between two remarkable women: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Virginia Woolf was already establishing herself as one of the most innovative writers of her generation. Brilliant, thoughtful, and deeply introspective, she was fascinated by the workings of the mind and the subtle movements of emotion. Her novels challenged the rigid storytelling traditions of the Victorian era and replaced them with something more fluid, more psychological, and more daring. Vita Sackville-West was different in almost every way. Tall, glamorous, and aristocratic, she moved through society with a confidence tha...

Berlin learned to make art from its woulds. By the late 1970s, the city was a collage of ghosts and scaffolding — half-rubble, half-rehearsal space. The Wall sliced through its heart like a bad scar, dividing not just politics but psychology. Yet in that crack, something began to grow: a scene that turned desolation into theatre. Squats became studios, bunkers became nightclubs, and every abandoned factory echoed with the clatter of typewriters and drum machines. Electricity was borrowed, paint was stolen, and rules were optional. The air smelled of damp concrete and hairspray — a mix that could either kill you or inspire you, depending on the night. Women like Nina Hagen , Gudrun Gut , and the members of Malaria! took punk’s raw nerve and wired it into performance art. They didn’t want to imitate London’s fury or New York’s poetry; they wanted to reinvent the body itself — to turn sound into gesture, movement into manifesto. In Berlin, punk wasn’t a style; it was a survival mechan...