Preface to the Fourth Edition

A QUARTER OF a century has gone by since the appearance of this book, the only full biography of George Curzon to be written since Lord Ronaldshay’s three-volume life of 1928. Following publication, it was gratufying to see historians and other writers take a more subtle approach to the subject’s character and achievements. There were fewer references to pomposity, the sense of grandeur and the anachronisms of the well-known caricature. Commentators began to appreciate such successes as his conservation work in India or at the Lausanne Conference, which led to the peace treaty with Turkey in 1923.

A few years later, in an age of renewed hostility between the West and much of the Middle East, some people remembered Curzon’s knowledge and understanding of the Arab world. In 1915 he had advised against the invasion of Mesopotamia (now Iraq) which led to the defeat and surrender of a British force at Kut el-Amara; in 1917 he opposed the Balfour Declaration, a document which has led to a century of conflict in the Holy Land.

Curzon and the politicians of his age figure little now in the popular imagination, except for Winston Churchill and perhaps David Lloyd George. They belong to an epoch which, though quite recent in time, seems incredibly remote in terms of customs, ideas and Britain’s international prestige.

Yet in the last year or so a couple of incidents have brought Curzon’s name to the attention of newspaper readers. One was the decision of Balliol, the Oxford college where he had studied, to take down from the Hall his portrait by Philip de Laszlo, to clean it and then rehang it in the study of one of its history dons, where only a few students would ever see it. To some journalists the action appeared to be prompted by the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ agitation, a campaign by students to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from nearby Oriel College. If true, it would indeed have been objectionable. Curzon was not like Rhodes, who had made his fortune through the exploitation of African labour, but a public servant sent out to administer India and later a cabinet member under two Liberal and two Conservative prime ministers; he was also a distinguished and long-serving chancellor of Oxford University. Balliol had been a left-wing college – notably under the mastership of Christopher Hill, an ex-communist historian – but Curzon had survived that regime only to be apparently sacrificed to the fads of political correctness. The truth, however, appears to be less dramatic. The wall space in Balliol Hall is limited, and the college was having a ‘re-think’ about filling it; besides, it had a new ‘master’, Dame Helen Ghosh, who was keen to use some of it to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of women’s admission as undergraduates. One may regret Curzon’s demotion, but it does not seem to be part of a new anti-colonial campaign.

The other recent episode in the news was a bizarre comparison made between Curzon and Boris Johnson, the Tory politician who had unexpectedly become foreign secretary after campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016. The idea originated with Johnson himself, who declared that the predecessor he most admired was ‘George Nathaniel Curzon, a most superior person’, and it was supported by the political journalist Peter Oborne who claimed that the Brexiter leader was, despite his inconsistency and ‘war-mongering’, the ‘most brilliant, learned and well-read British Foreign Secretary since Lord Curzon’.1 In the following year the Financial Times journalist Henry Mance said that the comparison was ‘obvious’: each man was an Old Etonian, a sparkling writer, a bon vivant [and] a favourite of the Daily Telegraph’.2

Such a comparison would have astonished Lord Curzon and, in the words of his great-grandson, Charles Metcalfe, left him ‘spinning in his marble tomb in Kedleston’. Although the two men had Eton, Balliol and the Foreign Office in common, they had few similarities as men or politicians. Curzon was not a ‘bon vivant’, said Metcalfe, but a man who was loyal to both his wives. Moreover, while Johnson was a ‘supremely lightweight gadfly’, Curzon ‘was famous for his exhaustive attention to both executing the grand strategy and focusing on the minutiae of policy detail’.3

The first editions of this book were published by John Murray and Papermac in 1994 and 1995 and later by Murray again. I am very grateful to Stuart Proffitt and his colleagues at Penguin for publishing this revised edition now.

Oxfordshire May 2019