Volume 56, Number 16 · October 22, 2009
The Elegant Optimist
By Julian Bell
Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love
by Sheila Rowbotham
Verso, 565 pp., $40.00; $24.95 (paper)
'One fought and battled for hope and grew weary in the struggle,' Bertrand Russell told a fellow No-Conscription activist, Constance Malleson, one autumn night in 1916. Talking into the small hours in the young actress's London flat, he 'prodded home' (as she would later write) a harsh, half-tragic vision of the progressive politics that had brought them together. 'One lived with the pain of the world and with all the cruelty of it.... One had to look into hell before one had any right to speak of heaven.'
Review, 2995 words
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