Michael Brock

This admirable biography answers nearly all the old questions about Herbert Samuel, but raises a few new ones. He was no more a ‘cold and dry person’ than Hugh Gaitskell was ‘a desiccated calculating-machine’. These descriptions, by Lloyd George and Aneurin Bevan respectively, reveal little more than the effects of personal irritation on imaginative Welsh politicians. In his final chapter Professor Wasserstein draws attention to ‘a fundamental innocence’ and ‘supreme intellectual self-confidence’ as two salient features of Samuel’s make-up. These characteristics, allied to immense industry and administrative capacity, invite a comparison with a British statesman of an earlier generation, Sir Robert Peel; and they made, as Peel’s career had shown, a dangerous combination.

In seven of the nine chapters in this fine book Dr Collini depicts the denizens of the Athenaeum in its great days. T.H. Huxley, having left his umbrella at Matthew Arnold’s, asks his friend to ‘bring it next time you come to the club’. Leslie Stephen, elected in 1877 on the strength of his History of English Thought in the 18th Century, enjoys the irony that this defence of free thought has given him ‘admission to a respectable haunt of bishops and judges’. By 1850, the Disruption in the Kirk has done its work: the Athenians have moved south from Edinburgh. The dominance of the dons and of the British Academy is still below the horizon. The world of the ‘public moralist’ revolves around Waterloo Place.

If it still needs to be proved that Kipling’s realism was highly intermittent, those lines from his last years should do the job. His correspondence was sure to reach biographers and editors in the end. He could hamper, but not stop them. Ever since the launch of the Kipling rocket more than forty years earlier he had been far too famous for his letters to have been thrown away. At 24 he had not been six months in London before the Times had devoted a leader to his work. In that year, 1890, Henry James had termed him ‘the star of the hour’; R.L. Stevenson had pronounced him ‘too clever to live’; and Tennyson had judged him ‘the only one … with the divine fire’. Nine years later, news of his illness had taken precedence in London over that of the Pope. Professor Pinney has access to some 6300 letters, drawn from 138 collections and 135 printed sources.

No political reputation has fluctuated, and been disputed, more violently than that of ‘Lord Grey of the Reform Bill’. Soon after his retirement in 1834 the Courier pronounced that no other public man had ‘ever had so great a claim to the gratitude of his country’. Less than two years later an ex-colleague, John Cam Hobhouse, commented: ‘I am surprised how, by mere fluency of speech and arrogance of manner, this really inferior man has contrived to lead a great party, and to connect his name imperishably with the most splendid triumphs of British legislation.’ Seventy years ago the Northumbrian piety of G.M. Trevelyan’s Life evoked comments almost as sharp as Hobhouse’s. ‘When the Almighty wants anything really done,’ Augustine Birrell commented in the Nation, ‘he creates a man or woman foolish enough to believe that, if the thing were done, all would be right with the world.’ ‘Mr Trevelyan,’ said H.W.C. Davis, ‘sees this great whig through a golden haze which softens all asperities, and disguises whatever is irrational in a very complex, rather petulant, and too fastidious personality. Indeed the haze becomes a halo.’

A review of this book has to start with its tragic and complex history. The official Life of Churchill was originally to be in five volumes. Randolph Churchill died in 1968 when only the first two of these had been published. The Trustees of the Chartwell Papers then invited Martin Gilbert to complete this multi-volume work, and the second Earl of Birkenhead to complement it with a one-volume Life. While Martin Gilbert and his team were at work Lord Birkenhead was to be the only other person given access to the Chartwell Papers: his book was not to be published until the last of Gilbert’s volumes had appeared.