STATESMAN OF EUROPE
A LIFE OF SIR EDWARD GREY
TG OTTE
Allen Lane, 858pp, £35
This huge book is the first full-length biography in 60 years of the Liberal Foreign Secretary now best known for his mournful remark in August 1914: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’
Of Whiggish landowning stock, Edward Grey preferred birdwatching and fly-fishing to people or politics but he stood for Parliament anyway and became an MP aged 23 in 1885. In opposition he supported ‘muscular liberalism’, embracing the causes of Home Rule and Women’s Suffrage. But he was increasingly absorbed by foreign affairs and was appointed Foreign Secretary by Asquith after the landslide election of 1906. Grey spent the next eight years trying to manage the problems presented by German unification, Russian resurgence and Ottoman decline. Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday
Times described Otte as presenting ‘a powerful case for the defence… [Grey’s] only mistakes were to underestimate the appetite for
Edward Grey preferred bird-watching and fly-fishing to people or politics
conflict in Vienna and St Petersburg, and to overestimate Germany’s ability to restrain its ally AustriaHungary.’ Paul Lay in the Times admired Otte’s meticulous and moving tracking of the well-known path to August 1914 and remarked the biography’s relevance to present concerns: ‘Britain’s place in the world; its relationship with Europe; competence and corruption among the political class; the limits of political power; constitutional reform; gender equality; even Grey’s concern with the natural environment.’ David Lough in the Literary
Review noted that Grey’s intimate life appears to go into remission after the death, in 1906, of a much-loved first wife who hated sex. ‘Otte gets to the moment when suddenly, after the war and aged 60, he married Pamela Glenconner, one of the most attractive women of the time. She comes and goes within ten pages. Despite Otte’s best efforts, the private Grey remains a dark horse.’