Julian Heward Bell was born in 1908, son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, grandson of Leslie Stephen, nephew of Virginia Woolf, first cousin once removed of ‘J. K. S.’ and H. A. L. Fisher. As he wrote himself in a poem ‘Autobiography’:

He was at school at Leighton Park, was placed in the first division of the second class in the History Tripos of 1929 and the English Tripos of 1930, and held the Reginald John Smith Studentship in 1930 and the Augustus Austen Leigh Studentship in 1931. The four years after taking his degree were occupied in working for a fellowship, first of all with a dissertation on Pope's poetry and afterwards with one on some applications of Ethics to Aesthetics and Politics. In 1935 he was appointed Professor of English in the Chinese University of Hankow. The scrappy and belated news, which reached him, of events in Spain made him impatient to get home. He returned in 1937 eager to be of any use to the Government cause in Spain, revisited Cambridge and, in spite of efforts to dissuade him, joined the British Medical Unit in Spain as a lorry-driver. He was killed by a bomb from an insurgent aeroplane whilst driving his ambulance on the Brunete front on 18 July 1937.