Norman Rose
London:Jonathan Cape, 2000, h/b London: Pimlico, 2001, £12.50, p/b
This passed me by when it was published but for anyone interested in the Carroll Quigley thesis about the role of the Round Table in British foreign policy this is a must. For, as Quigley told us in Tragedy and Hope, ‘the Cliveden set’ was simply the Round Table at one of its regular meeting places. In retelling the story of the people linked to Cliveden, the author devotes at least half the book to a study of the Round Table’s personnel from the days in Alfred Milner’s ‘kindergarden’ in South Africa through to the outbreak of WW2. I don’t know of any other book which does so.
Quigley appears right at the end of the book, one of his letters to Lord Brand in 1962 – and Brand’s dismissal of him – being briefly quoted. Rose accepts without question, apparently, Brandt’s rejection of Quigley’s thesis. Rose seems unaware of Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope, listing (but not citing) only his later and inferior The Anglo-American Establishment and what he misses – or has missed out; I would guess the former – is Quigley’s claim that the Round Table was the original creator of the US Council on Foreign Relations; and thus the network extended, initially any way, across the Atlantic. Even so there is enough here on the activities of the Round Table to make this book part of the evidence supporting Quigley’s thesis, rather than the opposite.