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100 YEARS AGO: MARCH 1918

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 was 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 [Russell] for immorality and sending him to prison!”

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