Leonard Woolf: A Life

With her new biography of Leonard Woolf, Victoria Glendinning moves him out of the shadow of his celebrated wife. An innovative civil administrator in Ceylon, a leading light of the Fabian society, a writer and the founder, with Virginia Woolf, of the pioneering Hogarth Press, Leonard emerges as a formidable figure in his own right. In this extract from the first chapter, Glendinning introduces us to him