John Buchan's Mr. Standfast and Bloomsbury

The phrase seems to be a reference to Peace at Once, an anti-war pamphlet written by Bloomsbury Group member Clive Bell and published in 1915. Bloomsbury was particularly enthusiastic about Russian culture.2 With the Russian expatriate, Samuel Koteliansky, both Woolfs translated some Russian authors into English.3 Buchan may well have been aware that Virginia Woolf had already written in praise of Russian fiction in a 1918 essay, "The Russian View." [...]I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action-men, we assume, who don't think" (9). Buchan shared many of Hannay's views about the innovations occurring in art and literature during and after the First World War, admitting that, "the rebels and experimentalists for the most part left me cold" and "the modern work most loudly acclaimed my traditionalist mind is simply not competent to judge at all" (Memory 202, 203).