Peacemaking 1919 [Hardcover]

Harold George Nicolson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0844661244 | ISBN-13: 978-0844661247 | Publication Date: June 1984 | Edition: First Ed.

Recollections of a British diplomat, who was a member of the Peace delegation of Great Britain at Paris. He wrote: "Given the atmosphere at the time, given the passions aroused in all democracies by four years of war, it would have been impossible even for supermen to devise a peace of moderation and righteousness."

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) was a man of manifold talents: a diplomat, politician, journalist, broadcaster, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, literary critic, essayist and gardener. Perhaps most celebrated for his Diaries (reissued by Faber Finds in their original three volumes), they run the risk of obscuring the excellence of his other books. He wrote over thirty: Some People, Sir Arthur Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919, Curzon, The Last Phase, 1919-1925, and The Congress of Vienna are all being reissued in Faber Finds. Harold Nicolson was educated at Wellington and at Balliol College, Oxford. He joined the Foreign Office in 1909, and in 1913 married the writer Vita Sackville-West. He was a member of the British delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. He left the Foreign Office in 1929, and in 1935 he was elected National Labour Member of Parliament for West Leicester. In 1940 he was appointed a Junior Minister in Churchill's wartime government. In his eulogy, John Sparrow, with affectionate aptness, described Harold Nicolson as 'a nineteenth-century Whig leading an eighteenth-century existence in the twentieth-century.' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Peter Smith Pub Inc; First Ed. edition (June 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0844661244
• ISBN-13: 978-0844661247
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,109,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "A riot in a parrot house", January 30, 2001

By 

T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Peacemaking 1919 (Hardcover)

So many books of English diplomatist Harold Nicolson are still in print. Books about him and his family continue to pour out. It is a pity, therefore, that PEACEMAKING 1919 is not still readily available to readers. --In November 1918 at the time of the armistice, Nicolson was a passionate Wilsonian. Within four months, at the Paris peace conference, he was thoroughly disillusioned. Wilson had too quickly made territorial concessions to Italy, contrary to the principles of the very Fourteen Points which had made a Wilsonian of Harold Nicolson. And the American idol would fall farther and faster thereafter. --Woodrow Wilson rendered more and ever more to Caesar while asserting that he was doing the work of God and the American people. Nor was Wilson the only sanctimonious hypocrite among the leaders of the Allied and Associated Powers at Paris. --Nicolson's diaries and reflections convey, as he intends to convey, the sense that the peace made at Paris to end World War I was the product of poor planning, disorganized diplomacy, growing fatigue and a very large disconnect between experts and decision-makers. --PEACEMAKING 1919 was written as a manual for young British diplomatists who would face future peace conferences. If they heeded Nicolson, they would then be in a position to avoid the disaster known as the Treaty of Versailles. For peace should not be made, as it was in Paris in 1919, in an atmosphere of a "riot in a parrot house." -OOO-