Loulou

In appending to his admirable life of Sir William Harcourt, published in 2004 (Harcourt and Son: A Political Biography of Sir William Harcourt, 1827–1904), a volume of extracts from the journals of Harcourt's son and confidential coadjutor, Patrick Jackson is towing a cockle-boat in the wake of a battle-cruiser. ‘Loulou’ Harcourt's journals, running from 1880 (when he was seventeen) to 1895, with a five-year gap from 1887 to 1892, are primarily the record of his devoted service to his father's career in the years when the latter was struggling to preserve the Liberal party from the centrifugal tendencies of Whigs and Radicals and from the consequences of Gladstone's inability to let go and Rosebery's to take hold. Accordingly, they were referred to substantially in the earlier work, so there is a certain familiarity about the important material these extracts contain on such subjects as the Irish question and the Liberal split over Home Rule, the death-throes of Gladstone's last ministry, and the embarrassments of Rosebery's brief reign. Jackson, however, has sought to maintain in his selection the balance of the original text between high politics and the more mundane aspects of its author's life, with the result that the greatest interest of the book lies in the intimate glimpse it offers of the mentality and manners of an élite world, still complacent enough in imperial power (‘Greece is to be coerced ... Burmah is to be annexed’, the cabinet decided one afternoon in 1886) to be only a little stirred and not much shaken by Fenian attacks in London (Loulou bought a swordstick for himself and, appropriately, a ‘British Bulldog’ revolver for his father), by unemployed riots and the advent of the Independent Labour party, and by Gaiety girls and American heiresses (Loulou eventually married one), nibbling at the fringes of great families

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