Welsh Journals

the touch and assurance which derive from being a leading authority on his subject. He has provided '0' and 'A' level pupils with exactly that blend which, as teachers, we would want them to have. First he has given an outline of Lloyd George's remarkable career from shoemaker's cottage in Llanystumdwy to Palace of Westminster and beyond, concentrating, naturally, on those remarkable creative years from 1906 to the outbreak of war, on his achievements as Minister of Munitions and his role in peace-making. With deceptive ease the author sets this career in the political, religious, educational and national context of late- nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Welsh and British history. The fruits of Dr. Morgan's prolific research-from the political history of Wales in these years to his acclaimed recent work on the 1918 22 period-are evident in deft strokes of analysis and judgement as he relates the story. Second, we are provided with a brief but superbly incisive summing-up of Lloyd George's place in twentieth-century history. We give thanks as we read that the author does not conceal his admiration for his subject's achievements; neither does he shrink from drawing attention to Lloyd George's political misjudgements and his political and personal ruthlessness. This analysis provides the ideal framework for essay or discussion work on Lloyd George's role in some of the fundamental issues of contemporary Welsh, Irish and British history. Third, and so important, Dr. Morgan provides a glimpse-he has space for no more-of the enigma, the Welsh wizard 'rooted in nothing'. Unfathomable to contemporaries, he has remained so to historians. The author's achievement is that while he has provided the facts and, incomparably at this level, the analysis, he has dwelt on and preserved the mystery. In the end, it is that which ensures the appeal of history to succeeding generations. This book carries a generous dedication. Together with his other readers, Dr. Morgan's former students will be reminded by the quality and appropriateness of this short biography not only of his gifts as a historian but also his talent as a teacher. GARETH E. JONES Swansea PORTRAIT OF A PROGRESSIVE: THE POLITICAL CAREER OF CHRISTOPHER, VISCOUNT ADDISON. By Kenneth and Jane Morgan. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980. Pp. ix, 317. £ 15.00. In our teaching, research and speculations, we tend to over-categorise the past by organising it in distinct periods or crises. We impose spatial and chronological divisions on the seamless web of history and in so doing often isolate personalities and events from their full and proper context. It often takes one ostensibly improbable career to make us realise the limitations of our perspective. I well recall how my own neat conception of the nineteenth century was exploded by a discovery that Gustave Cluseret, the Paris Commune's Minister of War in 1871, had not only played a part in the Revolutions of 1848 but had also fought in