First edition, first impression, Quentin Bell's copy, in the scarce jacket. This copy has the ink ownership inscription to the front free endpaper of Quentin Bell (1910-1996), son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, and the nephew of Virginia Woolf. He became a writer and art critic in his own right. Clive Bell's tract On British Freedom argues, with characteristic Bloomsbury contrarianism, that Britain, while politically one of the most free countries in the world, was in fact subjugated by social self-censorship due to the "reign of the Puritan-middle classes". He went so far as to claim that, in this sense, "Great Britain is one of the least free countries in the world" and that the "ordinary Englishman is, on the whole, less free than a Roman slave at the time of Hadrian." This was, he claimed, particularly true for writers and other generators of culture, who, "when they sit down to work for humanity, wonder whether what they want to say will be sanctioned by some shop-keeping alderman, or illiterate fox-hunter, or by a committee of dyspeptic and time-worn virgins."
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