War was never Sir Edward Grey’s métier

This meaty but easily digested biography pivots around the events either side of that fateful evening of 4 August 1914 when Britain’s ultimatum to Germany over Belgium ran out and Sir Edward Grey memorably remarked that the lamps were going out over Europe.

As foreign secretary for almost a decade before that, Grey had deftly orchestrated a web of alliances designed to keep the peace in Europe, and Britain the dominant global power. But war and its attendant carnage unravelled his life’s work, leaving him a nervous wreck. He hung on in office until 1916 when the new prime minister David Lloyd George unceremoniously swept him out.

Lloyd George later led the attack on him as a ‘calamitous foreign secretary’, so aloof and obsessed with the ‘concert of Europe’ that he neglected Liberal values in an rapacious imperialist age, and committed grave errors, such as failing to deter Russia from mobilising to support Serbia.