SOURCE: "Just for the Riband to Stick in Their Coats," in The Nation and the Athenaeum, Vol. XLIV, No. 13, December 29, 1928, p. 468.

Woolf was an English essayist and critic best known for his leading role in the Bloomsbury Group of artists and thinkers in early twentieth-century London. Woolf and his wife, the renowned writer Virginia Woolf founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. The Woolfs and other members of the Bloomsbury Group contributed greatly to the Modernist movement in literature and art. In the following review of the first English-language translation of La trahison des clercs, Woolf challenges Benda's thesis that the "treason of the intellectuals" is a strictly modern, or even widespread, phenomenon.

Last year intelligent people in France were reading and discussing M. Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clercs, indeed, my copy of the book has sixteenth edition on it (though that does not mean quite the same as...