Clive Bell got his start as a journalist writing reviews for the Athenaeum, a rather staid holdover from the Victorian era. In the years following the First World War he became a frequent commentator on art for magazines such as Vogue, The New Republic and Vanity Fair, and contributed often to the correspondence columns of national newspapers and other journals. His letters appeared most often, however, in the various iterations of what had begun as the Athenaeum. That magazine was absorbed in 1921 by The Nation, edited since its founding in 1907 by Hugh Massingham. In 1923, a consortium headed by Maynard Keynes bought The Nation & Athenaeum and installed Hubert Henderson as editor, with Leonard Woolf serving as Literary Editor until 1930. In 1931, it merged with The New Statesman, a Fabian weekly previously edited by Clifford Sharp. Desmond MacCarthy was its literary editor from 1920, writing a weekly column under the pseudonym ‘Affable Hawk’. Raymond Mortimer became its literary editor in 1935. The New Statesman and Nation was edited until 1960 by Kingsley Martin. Through all these changes, Clive Bell supplied witty, combative opinions on topics ranging from politics to the price of books. He was as likely to train his sarcasm on a close friend (like Desmond MacCarthy) as on an enemy (like Wyndham Lewis), and he showed no compunction about using what some referred to as Bloomsbury's ‘parish magazine’ to promote the work of his friends. For a wider public, such as the readers of the London Times, Bell could write in more measured tones, and by the end of his life he was taking the trouble to set the record straight when erroneous claims were made about those he had known intimately.

Tests for the Feeble-Minded

Sir—Not long ago I was dining at the house of a famous “mad doctor”—“alienist” is the genteeler word—in company with half a dozen specialists, “mentals” for the most part, all eminent in that profession, any two members of which are to have power over the liberty and manhood of the poor.