Clifford Sharp was the long-serving but now mostly forgotten first editor of the New Statesman. Operating across the Baltic in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, he was for a time a spy, an unlikely recruit to one of the Foreign Office’s shadowy anti-Bolshevik operations.
The quintessential Fabian technocrat, Sharp had journalistic skills that secured the fledgling NS’s survival in the face of modest sales and the upheaval of the First World War. He had been charged by Beatrice and Sidney Webb with challenging the left’s most fashionable pre-war weekly, the guild socialist New Age. He established his “paper” as a flagship of progressive opinion and an influential literary review.
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