Volume 3, Number 3 · September 24, 1964
Lloyd George's Tragedy
By David Marquand
The Mask of Merlin
by Donald McCormick
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 343 pp., $6.00
The Welsh have never been popular in England. (Nor, for that matter, have the English exactly won their way to the hearts of the Welsh.) Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the greatest Welshman in history should not yet have received his due at the hands of English historians, or the English public generally. For Lloyd George possessed all the qualities which the English find most unsettling in their volatile neighbors on the other side of Offa's Dyke. He was, to begin with, clever; and although English politicians are allowed to be as intelligent as they please in private, they are expected on public occasions to display a decent intellectual mediocrity. Second, he was unashamedly, almost blatantly devious; and it is one of the axioms of English politics that devious acts must be performed only in an ingenuous and freshfaced manner, accompanied by loud protestations of injured rectitude. Lastly, and most unforgiveably, he was totally irreverent.
Review, 1488 words
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