Keith Robbins (1) (1940–2019)
Autor(a) de The First World War
Para outros autores com o nome Keith Robbins, veja a página de desambiguação.
About the Author
Keith Robbins was formerly Professor of History at Bangor and Glasgow universities in the UK, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales. He has held the posts of President of the Historical Association, and Editor of History. He is the author of over 20 books, 8 edited books and 120 scholarly mostrar mais articles, and is the general editor of 6 major historical series. mostrar menos
Obras de Keith Robbins
The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain 1870-1992 (Foundations of Modern Britain) (1651) 26 cópias
The Blackwell Biographical Dictionary of British Political Life in the Twentieth Century (1990) 7 cópias
Great Britain: Identities, Institutions, and the Idea of Britishness (The Present and the Past Series) (1998) 6 cópias
Associated Works
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Outros nomes
- Robbins, K. G.
- Data de nascimento
- 1940-04-09
- Data de falecimento
- 2019-09-10
- Local de enterro
- Oxford, UK
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- UK
- Educação
- Bristol Grammar School, Bristol, UK
University of Oxford (Magdalen College, St Antony's College) - Ocupação
- Vice-Chancellor, University of Wales
Vice-Chancellor, University of Wales Lampeter - Organizações
- Learned Society of Wales (founding fellow)
Royal Society of Edinburgh (Fellow)
Royal Historical Society (Fellow)
Membros
Resenhas
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 26
- Also by
- 3
- Membros
- 307
- Popularidade
- #76,700
- Avaliação
- 3.5
- Resenhas
- 4
- ISBNs
- 66
- Idiomas
- 4
That Grey proved as influential as he was to the course of events was because of another notable aspect of his career. As Keith Robbins notes, Grey was the last Foreign Secretary who operated with the same independence of action that his predecessors had enjoyed in the nineteenth century. Though his successors would play important roles in shaping Britain’s international policy, none of them would do so with the same degree of autonomy enjoyed by Grey throughout most of his tenure in office.
Such a figure is well deserving of a study of his life and achievements. And this is what Robbins provides in his book, which was the first biography of Grey written with the benefit of access to the public records from his time at the Foreign Office. This helps him to compensate somewhat for the lack of personal papers, the absence of which has made assessing his formative years difficult. Grey’s youth and education are covered in a single chapter, with the narrative slowing down once he enters politics. Yet it is a testament to Robbins’s skill as a biographer that his coverage of Grey’s early life does not feel scanty or inadequate, but conveys a sense of his early life and the influences on it.
Though Grey won election as a Liberal to Parliament at the age of 23 and experienced a rapid rise in the party ranks, Robbins details the conflicted nature of his involvement with politics, as he frequently contemplated leaving it even as he emerged as one of the party’s leading figures on foreign policy. In many ways Grey was a bridge between the party’s past and its future: a descendant of the Whig gentry who nonetheless held progressive positions on such issues as women’s suffrage. That he was widely viewed by many as a potential prime minister reflected the esteem in which he was held by his colleagues, yet Grey himself seemed unwilling to pursue the post given the strain of his career on his fragile health.
Having established a background in foreign policy during his time as Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in William Gladstone’s final government, Grey was a natural choice to become Foreign Secretary when the Liberals formed a government in 1905. The chapters on Grey’s time at the Foreign Office take up over half the book, and offer a generally favorable account of Grey’s management of Britain’s foreign relations. Though Robbins draws out the alignments of Grey’s policies, he adopts a chronological approach that highlights the often reactive nature of Grey’s experience in the post. His direction of policy became much more constrained by the outbreak of war in 1914, though Grey soldiered on until the collapse of the Asquith coalition in December 1916 ended his tenure in office.
Overall Robbins’s book provides an excellent overview of Grey’s service in public office. While his book suffers somewhat from a more constrained examination of Grey’s private life and inner motivations this is a natural consequence of the limitations imposed by the available sources, though his abbreviated final chapter on Grey’s post-ministerial career could have been fleshed out more than it was. Nonetheless, Robbins’s book serves as a good starting point for anyone seeking to learn about the Foreign Secretary who played a key role in determining the course of the decades that followed.… (mais)