Leonard Woolf [antikvár]

In the Beginning Having a child is problematic, wrote Leonard Woolf when in his eighties, and childless. It concerns the 'new human being' as much as its parents, since this new human being is born without having given its consent. One should think twice, 'from the point of view of the hypothetical child'. He himself was born, without his consent, on 25 November 1880. There he is, Leonard Sidney Woolf, in the Census returns for 1881, a five-month-old baby. Everyone, holding a baby, has to wonder what life holds in store for him. No one could have foreseen what would happen to this one. He grew up to become a core member of a group of intimate and talented friends who continue to inspire interest and analysis a century later. In his early twenties, as a colonial servant, he administered ten thousand square miles of village and jungle. He became an anti-imperialist, a Marxist 'of a sort' and a socialist, and was an eminence grise of the early Labour Party in Britain as it became a party of government. His adult life spanned the two world wars; his writings informed the covenant of the League of Nations and, as polemical journalist, as editor and author, his lifelong mission was to prevent the barbarism and insanity of future war through international cooperation and collective security His anguished intelligence saw all too clearly both the failure of this great project, and what he saw as the failure of the Left in Britain. He