Leonard Woolf

Society

The politician and the intellectual

• 07 June 2007

Taken from The New Statesman 20 July 1940 The writer Leonard Woolf was a regular contributor to the New Statesman. In this article, published soon after the evacuation of Dunkirk, he argued that war against Germany could not be won unless intellectuals administered the country. His dislike of instinctiveness and improvisation reads rather strangely today. After all, Winston Churchill had been prime minister for only two months when Woolf wrote the piece, and he was already enjoying his finest hour. Selected by Robert Taylor