Deborah Lavin
Clarendon, Oxford, 1995, £45
Lionel Curtis was one of the major figures in the Round Table. Although Carroll Quigley is missing – not even cited and dismissed – Lavin’s book substantiates much of Quigley’s thesis about the Round Table — Council on Foreign Relations — Institute for Pacific Relations network. What’s wrong with it is the complete absence of any attempt to link the ideas with the money behind it: occasionally we discover that another group of men in ‘the City’ have bank-rolled another project. But that aside, if you want an academically reliable, solidly documented account of the Round Table network and many of its works, this is it. It is thus a very important book.
Bernard Porter mentioned to me a story he had heard from the author that the manuscript for the book had been lost or stolen not once but twice. I wrote to Lavin about this. She replied:
‘The manuscript was all but complete …..and, uniquely, all copies placed together in my car which was broken into in London where I stopped en route for Durham. All the ms. copies and research materials were stolen. Thereafter, when it was decided that the book was worth proceeding with, I worked on a word-processor, while keeping the research materials in my house in Oxfordshire. There they were destroyed in a fire.’
Well, now.