Years Between the Wars
FlAht to Live. By Robert Boothby. (Gollancz. 21s.) ROBERT BOOTHBY, member of Parliament, journalist, broadcaster and lecturer, has written an alive, arresting and provocative autobiography which gives a clear picture of the mistakes of the past, contains pungent criticisms of the economic situation of the present day and stresses the need of urgency for our future. The book is divided into two parts. The first part opens with an account of life at Oxford in the 'twenties and the mentality of that post-war genera- tion ; this is followed by an attempt to describe the social back- ground of the fashionable world in England between the wars. These early chapters are the least successful and contain too.many lists of names. It is to be regretted that the author, when describing his youth and his years at Oxford, has not allowed his readers the benefit of his Falstaffian wit which is the joy of his friends and can mellow his enemies.
Robert Boothby is a bohemian at heart and was always restless and ill at ease in London drawing-rooms or at parties in country houses, and he would have been wise to have left the chronicles of those vanished days to the surer pen of Osbert Sitwell. However, from the moment Boothby begins to tell his political story he shows himself to be an astute journalist and shrewd observer of life, men and current events. As a member of Stanley Baldwin's secretariat of young Conservatives and later as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Winston Churchill for three years, he had every opportunity of watching the chief actors on the political stage from very close quarters. He could see the darkening scene from the wings during the fateful years that led up to the humiliation of Munich. He was in a position to hear the happenings of the day discussed by leading men and women, and he does not hesitate to give his own contribu- tion from time to time. There are records of his travels to the United States, Russia, Germany and Central Europe, with bio- graphical sketches of the statesmen he met. His impressions of Bruning stand out vividly amongst the motley crowd of Europeans he lived and talked with. He gives first-hand accounts of the turn- ing points in history at the Lausanne and Genoa Conferences, and his conversations with Lloyd George add great interest to many pages of the book.
The second part, entitled The Problems of Peace, is an attempt to apply the deductions which the author considers should be drawn from the deplorable events which led up to the second world war. The continuing link between the two books is really Robert Boothby's consistency of outlook towards three main points : his hatred of all forms of totalitarian government combined with his passionate belief in individual freedom ; his continued faith in the vital neces- sity for some form of collective security and his hopes for a deliber- ately planned policy of economic expansion. All these complicated issues are dealt with in a manner to make them clear to the general reader.
In the final chapters there are forceful criticisms of Bretton Woods and of the American Loan and an admirable exposition of the ideas Maynard Keynes bequeathed to us. Boothby spent three months in the United States in 1945 lecturing and reporting for the News of the World, and we are given a fascinating eve-witness account of the San Francisco conference. There are also short essays on such varied subjects as Robert Burns, Karl Marx, Freud, funda- mental democracy and the foundations of Conservative belief. The whole eventful story is told by a man who has enjoyed watching the high table of the game of politics and who, with a gambler's instinct, has thrown his own stake on to the table. He has had luck and set-backs at times, but in his writings there appears no trace of bitterness or unkindness towards his fellow men. Robert Boothby has chosen for the title of his book I Fight to Live, but after reading it one feels that he has not had to fight very hard, and that his intense zest for life has made such struggle as there was not wholly
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