Webb, Beatrice

In 1936Kay Pryor graduated from the Slade, and decided that the development of his painting would be best served by moving to Paris. He had never been as deeply concerned with the day-to-day work of the Solmani Press as his younger brother, Gareth, and his departure made little difference to the running of it. But, as William wrote in a letter to Beatrice Webb,... 

What is remarkable, then, is the quality of the contribution he made in his decades as a philosopher. Actually, his first book on a nonscientific theme was being conceived in the 1930s when he attacked the Russian economic system and at the same time confironted the leading British social scientists of his day, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, who d published a learned volume explaining how the Soviet five-year-plan constituted a superb innovation and was bringing prosperity to the USSR. My father took this thesis apart in a series of essays, which became a book in 1940, that went far beyond economics and inquired why it was that British liberals, the so-called Fabians, were so careless of the freedoms that they enjoyed the book was called The Contempt of Freedom. It was an influential book and... 

For centuries, the relief of both poverty and illness, especially illness affecting the poor, was the responsibility of the church. It is interesting to notice, wrote socialist dreamers Sidney and Beatrice "Webb in 1910, that the Public Health medical service and the Poor Law medical service sprang historically from the same source, namely the prevalence of disease among the pauper class, and the economy of diminishing it. In the modern world, the state assumes both functions. Since "World War II, the relief of illness has been increasingly perceived as a duty the state owes all its citizens. 

There was the Macaulay-Cripps-Hobhouse-Babington-Booth-Beatrice Webb clan. There was the Arnold-Trevelyan-Huxley-Darwin-Wedgwood clan, which contained members of the Keynes, Vaughan-Williams, Sidgwick, Cornford and Barlow families. Or the Fry-Hodgkin-Haldane-Mitchison-Butler-Faber-Adam Smith connection. Or the Stephen-Venn-Elliot-Strachey— Barnes-Shuckburgh strain, and so on. ... 

Webb, Patrick, and Beatrice Rogers. 2003. Addressingthe In in Food Insecurity Occasional Paper No. 1. Washington, DC U.S. Agency for International Development, Office of Food for Peace. 

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