Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf, embodied the contradictions of his generation in 1930s England. During his short life, he was vaiously labeled a poet, teacher, libertine, pacifist, miltary strategist, activist and soldier. His identity, difficult in formation, was overshadowed by the talented and, sometimes, authoritarian circle of Bloomsbury. In 1935, he had urged the young men of his generation to resist war even if accused of being "unpatriotic"; in 1937, under the political force of Fascism, he and his generation found that their "peace mind" had grown into a "war mind." He enlisted as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil war where he died at the age of twenty-nine, "a violent finish in hot blood."
