This essay addresses the implications of Margaret Thatcher's explicit criticism of Bloomsbury in her memoir, The Path to Power. Thatcher and Woolf circulate as icons of opposing cultural politics in a struggle that has persisted from the 1920s until now. Woolf's attitudes to middlebrow culture, exemplified by the representation of London suburbs in her writings, are antagonistic to Thatcherite thinking, a worldview that holds sway not only in critical attitudes to Woolf and Bloomsbury but also in the public posture of American politicians. Woolf's attitudes to class form a resistance to such postures.

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Hussey shows that Clive Bell was a lifelong rebel. His tireless championing of individual liberty as the paramount value of political and social organisation, and of subjective experience as the proper basis for aesthetics pervades his writings on art, society, history and politics. He proselytized for the radically new art of the early twentieth century and for pacifism before and during the First World War. He excoriated the puritanical strictures of post-war England and its appeasement and adherence to untenable ideals in the late 1930s and Second World War. In his close identification with the conscientious objector issue, Bell, though heterosexual, is representative of queer Bloomsbury’s challenge to heteronormativity and the patriarchal family. As nationalist and homophobic rhetoric converged at war’s end, Bell’s writings deplored the lasting effects on British society of the government’s suppression of thought and expression during the war, including queer thought and homosexual expression.