Skip to main content
A look back 100 years to WWI

IN EARLY March 1918 literary historian Lytton Strachey was close to publishing his soon to be famous book of essays Eminent Victorians, which treated his highly respectable subjects with a near scandalous degree of irreverence and wit.

He had recently attended the trial of anti-war philosopher Bertrand Russell, when the latter had been sentenced to six months in prison for inciting disaffection in a January article in the No Conscription Fellowship’s weekly Tribunal.  

His sympathies were entirely with Russell. He wrote in a letter to a Bloomsbury circle fellow member: “It was really infamous … The spectacle of a louse like Sir John Dickinson rating Bertie for immorality and sending him to prison!”

Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
MT
Features / 15 November 2024
15 November 2024
JOHN ELLISON looks back to the 1974 general election in Greece which freed the people from the oppressive military junta
Harold Wilson arrives in Downing St 1974
Features / 31 July 2024
31 July 2024
JOHN ELLISON looks back at the Wilson government’s early months, detailing how left-wing manifesto commitments were diluted, and the challenges faced by Tony Benn in implementing socialist policies
An injured Palestinian boy is carried from the ground follow
Features / 11 January 2024
11 January 2024
Robert Fisk and John Pilger knew that the legacy of the aggression of the US and its allies against the Middle East was crucial to understanding that crimes like the war on Gaza will only lead to more violence, writes JOHN ELLISON
MAN WITH A BOAT: Tory leader Edward Heath poses for the came
Features / 4 December 2023
4 December 2023
JOHN ELLISON looks at the miners' strike and Shrewsbury 3 case that led Edward Heath to ask ‘Who governs Britain?’ and the electorate to answer: not you
Similar stories
9sailors
Features / 11 November 2024
11 November 2024
TONY COLLINS reveals the true story of the end of WWI – a story of rebellions, mutinies and strikes by soldiers and others determined to end the horrific slaughter, a story buried under official rituals and ceremonies
Demonstrators outside the Amba Hotel at Marble Arch, London,
Features / 10 September 2024
10 September 2024
TONY COLLINS looks at the evidence he has uncovered in his research on our early labour movement of deep and hostile police infiltration that ruined lives in the last century
battlekohima
Features / 13 June 2024
13 June 2024
We have long struggled for black and Asian Allied soldiers to be properly acknowledged in Europe's commemorations — but now a worse travesty is upon us, as Russia’s crucial role is purged from the record, writes ROGER McKENZIE
11peacedove
Features / 15 May 2024
15 May 2024
On International Conscientious Objectors’ Day, GEOFF TIBBS explains why we should listen to the voices of COs as they bear witness to the legal, social and coercive mechanisms that war depends on