Though less well known than his wife, Virginia, Leonard Woolf also had a remarkable career. His political education was multifaceted and complete, and despite success in the Ceylon civil service, he became a forceful critic of imperialism and an outstanding champion of the self-determination of third-world peoples. Contact with hideous London slums, totally alien to his boyhood, and with the desperate plight of working-class women led him to be a lifelong socialist and an early advocate of women's rights. World War I, which destroyed forever the old secure civilization he knew as a child, made him a proponent of the League of Nations, a hater of tyranny, and a student of the roots of war and the inadequacies of the human psyche that failed to match his own unflinching rationalism. Becoming a novelist before his wife, he soon abandoned fiction for literary journalism and political comment, producing some...