Isabelle Anscombe

Isabelle Anscombe is the non-fiction writing name of crime novelist and screenwriter Isabelle Grey and her pseudonym V.B. Grey.

I began writing my first book on the Arts & Crafts Movement with Charlotte Gere while working as PA to Michael Whiteway, a London antiques dealer specialising in the Gothic Revival and Arts & Crafts. l went on to write further books on the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century decorative arts while also contributing a wide range of articles, reviews and features to national newspapers and magazines, and writing essays for exhibition catalogues for galleries in London and New York. Much of my work was based on interviews with surviving Modernist designers and members of the Bloomsbury Group.

The first articles I wrote on 20th-century decorative arts for 'The Times' in the late 1970s were, believe it or not, seen as pretty radical, as the newspaper's cut-off point for "antiques" was 1830. And my editor at Thames & Hudson, who published 'Omega & After', about Charleston Farmhouse and the Omega Workshops, prophesied that it might be the book that would 'end the Bloomsbury industry'!

My books and journalism allowed me to meet many fascinating and inspiring people, and it was a particular privilege to interview some of the leading women designers of the twentieth century featured in 'A Woman's Touch' and published by Virago.