A nation of meddlers

If you thought that bust of Lenin you had on your desk as a teenager was the ultimate in radical chic, think on. Infatuated with the French Revolution, Lord Stanhope proclaimed his solidarity at a banquet at White’s Club. Announcing that he was thenceforth to be known as Citizen Stanhope, he ordered the coronets to be removed from the iron gates of his estate, Chevening.

Despite its title, David Pryce-Jones’s new book isn’t just, or even especially, about traitors. It’s a high-speed survey of prominent British citizens who have taken up foreign causes. Fellow-travellers, war-tourists, flauters of the Foreign Enlistment Acts and romantic propagandists take their places here alongside your run-of-the-mill fifth-columnists, and your basic berks like Citizen Stanhope.

Pryce-Jones diagnoses freelance meddling in foreign conflicts — ordinarily the prerogative of the state — as something of a British disease, proceeding from a patronising sense of superiority and the boring blessings of long-term domestic stability. In his introduction, he makes clear where he stands:

Only the greatest novelists could do justice to the complex bundle of Utopian or millenarian fantasies, the twinned hatred and self-hatred, the narcissism, guilt, sanctimoniousness, hunger for power, fanaticism and nihilism that are on display in Treason of the Heart.

He finds some humdinging examples. A wonderful single paragraph eviscerates, sentence by sentence, how exactly wrong Hazlitt was about Napoleon. We read of the scarlet-and-gold comic-opera uniform Lord Byron had run up for his expedition to Greece, and meet the preening Ottoman partisan David Urquhart, who gave up using a knife and fork, took to walking around barefoot and insisted on being called ‘Daoud Bey’.

Pryce-Jones’s approach, as a historian, is slightly eccentric, though: not so much to understand, explain or analyse the differing foreign nationalisms (or, in the case of Thomas Paine at one end and Kim Philby at the other, internationalisms) embraced by his protagonists, so much as to tell them off for embracing them.