Peacemaking 1919

London: Methuen & Co LTD, 1964. First Methuen printing of revised edition. Hardcover. Good/Good. xxiv, 378 pages. Index. This book contains two parts: a historical survey of the organization, methods, and problems of the Paris Peace Conference; and extracts from the author's 1919 diary. This includes the Introduction to the Edition of 1943, a decade after its initial publication in 1933 (in the U.S. by Houghton Mifflin). The lengthy and salient Introduction, written in the midst of the WWII whose seeds had been sown through the Peacemaking activities of 1919, remains prescient and profound today. Sir Harold George Nicolson KCVO CMG (21 November 1886 - 1 May 1968) was a British politician, diplomat, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, journalist, and broadcaster. His wife was the writer Vita Sackville-West. During the First World War, he served at the Foreign Office in London during which he was promoted to Second Secretary. As the Foreign Office's most junior employee at this rank, it fell to him on 4 August 1914 to hand Britain's revised declaration of war to Prince Max von Lichnowsky, the German ambassador in London. He served in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 for which he was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the 1920 New Year Honours. Nicolson entered the House of Commons as National Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Leicester West in the 1935 election. He was one of the relatively few MPs to alert the country to the threat of fascism. More a follower of Anthony Eden in that regard than of Churchill, Nicolson was still a friend of Churchill. Nicolson often supported Churchill's efforts to stiffen British resolve and support rearmament. 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." Harold Nicolson's Peacemaking, 1919 remains the indispensable source on the atmosphere of the conference. 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.'.