A Hero to His Mistress

Lloyd George: A Diary by Frances Stevenson, edited by A. J. P. Taylor Harper, 338 pp., $10 In the isolation of our ordinary lives we tend to forget or at least disregard the puniness of our rulers. Then of a sudden, in some intimate glimpse or personal memoir we realize again that most affairs of state are conducted by those “taken from a county jail.” This is apparent in all vividness in the diaries of Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s confidential secretary and even more confidential mistress from 1912 until a short time before his death when he married her.

SHE attended international conferences with him, met most of the chief participants, wrote down what she heard and what he told her. She was an intelligent as well as a devoted woman. The result of her day-by-day jottings is Lloyd George: A Diary, her chronicle of the foibles of the great (except, of course, Lloyd George’s) that sometimes drifts off into a catalog of forgotten names and at other times flashes like a falling star across the political sky. The most fascinating part of the diary, which concludes falteringly in 1944, is of course the First World War. Reading it, one wonders how the Allies ever won. On September 21, 1914, Miss Stevenson wrote:

FR

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Francis Russell

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Lloyd George: A Diary by Frances Stevenson, edited by A. J. P. Taylor Harper, 338 pp., $10 In the isolation of our ordinary lives we tend to forget or at least disregard the puniness of our rulers. Then of a sudden, in some intimate glimpse or personal memoir we realize again that most affairs of state are conducted by those “taken from a county jail.” This is apparent in all vividness in the diaries of Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s confidential secretary and even more confidential mistress from 1912 until a short time before his death when he married her.

SHE attended international conferences with him, met most of the chief participants, wrote down what she heard and what he told her. She was an intelligent as well as a devoted woman. The result of her day-by-day jottings is Lloyd George: A Diary, her chronicle of the foibles of the great (except, of course, Lloyd George’s) that sometimes drifts off into a catalog of forgotten names and at other times flashes like a falling star across the political sky. The most fascinating part of the diary, which concludes falteringly in 1944, is of course the First World War. Reading it, one wonders how the Allies ever won. On September 21, 1914, Miss Stevenson wrote: