At the beginning of Mr Holroyd's third volume Shaw, now 62, is expressing strong views, sensible but not attended to, on the conduct of the nation's affairs in a difficult postwar period. He began this long last lap of life by campaigning for Ramsay MacDonald, and the other anti-Coalition candidates, in Lloyd George's opportunistic general election of December 1918. He opposed the blockade of Germany, the demand for reparations and the hanging of the Kaiser. Most of the candidates he favoured, including MacDonald, failed to get elected, but he went on, undismayed, to write a combative pamphlet on the Peace Conference, calling the Treaty of Versailles 'perhaps the greatest disaster of the war'. There was now nothing to be done in foreign affairs, he said, but to 'face the question of the next war pending the consolidation of the League of Nations'.

LRB 26 September 1991 | PDF Download