Welsh Journals

market had obvious reasons to fear any further diminution in world free trade. In the last resort, Chamberlain could not convince his countrymen that the vision he had seen of Britain as the centre of a well-organised world empire, held together by imperial preference and able to challenge Germany and America, was a realistic one. R. C. K. Ensor remarked long ago that Chamberlain lacked 'luck' which, he shrewdly added, may be a 'synonym for a certain final felicity of judgement'. The present book seems to bear that out. Chamberlain was not simply out-manoeuvred by Balfour, brilliant though Balfour may have been. He had misjudged both his timing and the attitudes of his countrymen. Economic policy always has a psychological as well as a scientific dimension. Current controversies about the Common Market may well rekindle interest in the great debates of the Victorian and immediate post-Victorian era. Dr. Rempel's book is a useful contribution to this, and it is fortunately both readable and of reasonable length. M. E. CHAMERLAIN Swansea. BEAVERBROOK. By A. J. P. Taylor. Hamish Hamilton, 1972. Pp. xvii, 712. £ 6.50. Mr. Taylor has taken the Gospel according to Beaverbrook and produced the Authorised Version. Using Beaverbrook's personal records, now housed in the splendid library that bears his name, the most stimulating twentieth-century historian has written not a biography but a history of Beaverbrook's career with affection, zest and evident enjoy- ment. This long book does ample justice to its subject's varied activities. Like Max Aitken, Mr. Taylor has often taken delight in 'putting two naked wires together, whatever the resulting explosion', and it comes as no surprise to find him following Beaverbrook's example and 'putting in a remark or story because it seemed to me to be funny without implying that it was significant or even true'. The result is entertaining and stimu- lating. To a very great extent it is, of course, history from the Beaver's viewpoint. The author has ignored Churchill's advice to Beaverbrook about the story of their office-seeking in 1916 that 'This personal and private episode is in no way necessary to the profoundly interesting chapter on English constitutional history with which your book is concerned'. Personal and private anecdotes abound. He reveals much of Beaverbrook's personal life, his generosity, his business methods, the early financial activity in Canada and his newspaper activity. His account of the false trail of the Empire Crusade merits attention, and the evidence for Beaverbrook as an idiosyncratic radical in British politics-not the archetypal Express reactionary-is compelling. Beaverbrook played a central part in British history only in the two world wars. First, through his association with Bonar Law, in the December 1916 crisis, and later in troubled harness with Churchill during the Second World War. Mr. Taylor rightly seizes upon the 'kingmaker' episode in