文章基本信息

标题：The Lloyd George War Memoirs
本地全文：下载
作者：J. Graham Jones
期刊名称：Cercles : Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1292-8968
出版年度：2011
期号：21
页码：95-111
出版社：Université de Rouen
摘要：The Lloyd George War Memoirs, originally published in six volumes between 1933 and 1936, immediately made a major impact which has proved enduring [SUTTIE: Chapter 1, 'Writing the War Memoirs, 1931-36', 10-25]. Theyhave been heavily quarried and extensively cited and quoted by political and military historians and biographers ever since as first-hand evidence in relation to the seminal events and key personalities of the First World War. They aroused notably strong reactions when first published in the 1930s both from press critics in their reviews and from the wider reading public at large.1 The outspoken, vehement attacks on the generals of the Great War aroused particular condemnation, but there were also favourable comments from critics and reviewers on the thoroughness of the underlying research, the detailed documentation and the captivating literary style. The depth of the interest and the spontaneity of the reaction come as little surprise. When the first volume of the War Memoirs was published in September 1933, the Great War had come to an end less than fifteen years earlier and was thus still fresh in the minds of the entire adult population. Also, although he had permanently fallen from power in the autumn of 1922, Lloyd George remained an important political figure who had re-emerged to succeed Asquith as the leader of the 're-united' Liberal Party between 1926 and 1931, was always in the forefront of the thoughts of Stanley Baldwin and J. Ramsay MacDonald when they were planning their political machinations, and had come very close to a return to political power at the height of the political and constitutional crisis of August 1931. Small wonder, therefore, that the publication of the War Memoirs aroused so much public interest and strongly ambivalent reactions in the 1930s