20–22843
In writing this biography the author has drawn upon “the memories of twenty-seven years of unbroken friendship” and in summing up the characteristics of his friend he says: “It is this combination of the slow qualities, with the swift—of judgment with daring, of mercy with rigour, of slow reflection with swift attack, of the zeal of the Cambrian with the shrewdness of the Fleming—that marks him off from so many of his race.” The first thirteen chapters are devoted to Lloyd George’s childhood and youth and earlier career up to the beginning of the war and the rest of the contents is: A war man (1914–1915); East or west? (1915); Serbia (1915): Munitions (1915): The new ministry of munitions; Premiership (1916); The saving of Italy; The Versailles council; Victory; The peace conference; The new world; The man; Highways and byways; Through foreign eyes. There are illustrations, appendices and an index.
“This record has the force of an autobiography rather than of a detached appraisal.”
+ Booklist 17:29 O ’20
Reviewed by D: J. Hill
+ Bookm 52:163 O ’20 1800w Boston Transcript p6 Je 23 ’20 1800w
“The book is pitched in a high dithyrambic key which is too laboriously sustained to be convincing and at last becomes exasperating. The literary frills are, moreover, a trifle cheap and shabby. Either the whole thing is the most flagrant and therefore self-defeating sort of pamphleteering or Mr Spender’s once robust literary sense is suffering a sad decline.” R: Roberts
− Freeman 1:571 Ag 25 ’20 1650w
“Mr Spender’s portrait of the Prime Minister can claim in one respect only to be a faithful one. It is Mr Lloyd George as he appears to himself—not to his Maker. Not merely by false interpretation of events but by false attribution of qualities and acquirements Mr Spender fabricates his hero.” J. A. Hobson