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.

War and its attendant carnage unravelled Grey’s life work and left him a nervous wreck

You won’t find such criticism here. T.G. Otte is an admirer of Grey’s steady hand and application. As a diplomatic historian he revels in carefully drafted cables and personal contacts between Chancelleries. (The pre-war German and Russian envoys to Britain were first cousins, as of course were the hereditary rulers of all three countries.)

Similarly, there’s none of the determinism found in A.J.P. Taylor’s cheeky suggestion that railways accelerated the hostilities. Otte is a lucid champion of the human factor in the steady development of events. The main railway on offer is the North Eastern Railway (NER), of which Grey was chairman. Its earlier incarnation, the Newcastle and Berwick Railway, ran its line through land at Fallodon, his ancestral home in Northumberland, after his grandfather granted permission, as long as the company opened a ‘halt’ there, so he could get to London for government business.