If you thought that bust of Lenin you had on your desk as a teenager was the ultimate in radical chic, think on. Infatuated with the French Revolution, Lord Stanhope proclaimed his solidarity at a banquet at White’s Club. Announcing that he was thenceforth to be known as Citizen Stanhope, he ordered the coronets to be removed from the iron gates of his estate, Chevening.
Despite its title, David Pryce-Jones’s new book isn’t just, or even especially, about traitors. It’s a high-speed survey of prominent British citizens who have taken up foreign causes. Fellow-travellers, war-tourists, flauters of the Foreign Enlistment Acts and romantic propagandists take their places here alongside your run-of-the-mill fifth-columnists, and your basic berks like Citizen Stanhope.
Pryce-Jones diagnoses freelance meddling in foreign conflicts — ordinarily the prerogative of the state — as something of a British disease, proceeding from a patronising sense of superiority and the boring blessings of long-term domestic stability.
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