We can think of Leonard Woolf in many different ways: essayist, novelist, publisher, journalist, Labour Party theorist, international relations scholar, and husband. Yet how often do we consider this polymath a media sensation? Hyperbole perhaps, but during the 1930s and 1940s, Woolf appeared regularly on British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio, lecturing on topics as diverse as the British Empire, democracy, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and pedagogy. After a silence of 15 years, Woolf re–emerged during the 1960s as a frequent contributor to radio and television broadcasts in Britain, Australia, Canada, and Sri Lanka. Woolf contributed to programs regularly, so much so that he required reassurance about his over–exposure to the public after featuring on the airwaves twice in a week (Watkins). Conversely, in 1967, he also expressed concern that a program he was participating in would air on the mainstream television station BBC 1, and not the highbrow arts service BBC 2, which was of limited interest to many viewers (Woolf, “Letter to Powell”). Woolf's desire to use his interpretation of the past to meld the present encouraged his re–engagement with broadcast media late in life. Woolf's five autobiographies, published during the 1960s, used his prominence as a public intellectual—essayist, publisher, and political theorist—to become an architect of perceptions of the Bloomsbury Group, which was rapidly becoming an object of academic and literary scrutiny. As one prescient BBC researcher noted in 1967, Woolf's cultural interventions now and then situated him at the center of a nexus of artistic and literary endeavor (Richardson).

Woolf 's television and radio work of the 1960s, however, is significant less for its literary curatorship than for the connection it provides to his interest in public education, intellectual development and improvement, and artistic production during the 1930s. One typical method for examining Woolf 's cultural interventions is to consider them through the terminology he provided us: civilization and barbarity. A more eff ective approach might be to consider how he engaged with modes of artistic production and interpretation. The act of commemoration is, in this circumstance, an explicitly politicized act defining how a public consumes and understands literary products.