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inflation, to deadlock in foreign affairs, and to pressure for an anti- socialist 'Centre Party', the strange alternating moods of nostalgia for pre-war and for a sweeping programme of 'reconstruction' still require close and detailed inquiry. Secondly, Lloyd George's attitude to the Irish question as a whole still remains elusive. As Mr. Boyce argues, he failed to reveal that sensitivity towards public and press opinion in his Irish policies down to June 1921 that he so frequently demonstrated elsewhere. Indeed, Lloyd George's general view of the Irish problem over the years is remarkably complex. Whatever his earlier opinions, he had never been, as he claimed so often in Cabinet discussions in 1918-21, simply 'a Gladstonian home ruler'. In the mid-1890s he had proclaimed Welsh separatism of an advanced kind; yet his programme of 'home rule all round' was really an alternative to Irish nationalism, not a recognition of it. A web of political, religious and imperial considerations led him to exclude Ireland from his creed of national self-determination; yet he came nearer to achieving home rule in June 1916 than any other man. Down to May 1921 he was foremost among those ministers demanding a vigorous prosecution of the military campaign against Sinn Fein; yet his links with the Ulstermen were never intimate. In the end he was prepared to coerce them too. Contemporaries were baffled by his constant shifts of position, and historians have been ever since. Perhaps Mr. Boyce, now a lecturer at the University College of Swansea, will be ideally equipped to provide a pan-Celtic perspective on this problem. In the end, as Mr. Boyce shows, Lloyd George produced a treaty which satisfied none of the major factions in Ireland, north or south, and which was manufactured to suit English, not Irish requirements. The irony was that his triumph appeared to ensure his political survival at Westminster; yet in ten months he was turned out of office for ever. By contrast, his patchwork solution of the Irish question (complete with ambiguous promises about a boundary commission) endured for fifty years until it collapsed, a lengthy period indeed by Irish standards. It was the most paradoxical of settlements achieved by the most paradoxical of prime ministers. KENNETH O. MORGAN The Queen's College, Oxford. THE CLASSICAL TRADITION IN WEST EUROPEAN FARMING. By G. E. Fussell. David and Charles, 1972. Pp. 237. £ 4.20. In a number of his previous books, Dr. Fussell has set himself formidable problems of comprehension and elucidation. But none can have been more exacting than those implicit in this recent volume. He attempts, in short, to show how, up to the middle of the nineteenth century, agriculture and farming processes were based largely upon traditional methods, and particularly upon the classical agricultural traditions. He argues that from