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Penultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain

A return to the grand themes

Wm. Roger Louis
I.B. Tauris, 320pp, £35,

Raymond Carr

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Raymond Carr reviews the new book from Wm. Roger Lewis

It is this emphasis on great personalities that distinguishes this book and which was dismissed by social historians as a lamentable relapse into Carlyle’s heretical doctrine that history was made by great men such as Cromwell and Frederick the Great. In this book, for Kenneth O. Morgan, Clemenceau, prime minister of France, was a brutal practitioner of confrontational politics, an intellectual and patron of modern art. Lloyd George, our prime minister from 1916 to 1922, was neither. He was a mercurial and intuitive political genius. Like Tony Blair, he could, when he chose, ‘charm a bird off a bough’. He was also a sexual goat. Susan Petersen recounts how Lloyd George in 1913 presented his daughter’s tutor Frances Stevenson with the chance of becoming his private secretary on condition that she slept with him. Unlike France, in England sexual misdemeanours could wreck a politician’s career. Such was the fate of Parnell and Profumo. Edwardian England’s pragmatic hypocrisy allowed a public figure to get away with adultery provided he played according to the rules of the game and remained publicly married, as did Lloyd George until his wife died.

Other biographical studies include Kipling, with his perpetual hunt for heroes to worship, and Cecil Rhodes, with his schemes for forming a secret society with the object of furthering the British empire by bringing the whole of the unchartered world under British rule. Tolkien, famous for The Lord of the Rings, never forgot his five months in the trenches of the Somme.

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