General Smuts: South Africa

Professor Antony Lentin is Visiting Professor and Tutor in Law at the Open University, where he was previously Professor of History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a barrister. He is the author of Guilt at Versailles: Lloyd George and the Pre-History of Appeasement and Lloyd George and the Lost Peace: from Versailles to Hitler, 1919-1940 (2001) and wrote the Historical Association booklet The Versailles Peace Settlement (1991, 1993, second, revised edition, 2003). Professor Alan Sharp is Provost of the Coleraine Campus at the University of Ulster. He joined the History Department at Ulster in 1971 and has been successively Professor of International Studies, a post in which he helped to set up degrees in International Studies and, later, International Politics and Head of the School of History and International Affairs. His major publications include The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in Paris, 1919 (1991) amongst others.

'As this excellent book powerfully shows, he was a man of exceptional broad-mindedness, moral (and physical) courage, realistic wisdom happily married to idealism, admired and almost revered by major figures in Europe, and driven by a highly positive dynamism, all inspired by a passionate longing for, simply, a better world...' 'A great strength of this book is the fact that about 40% of it is made up of quotations - most from Smuts's own writings and speeches, but many uttered by leading British and European figures who knew him, and some by members of his family. The author mostly allows the characters to speak for themselves, which gives his account great solidity. A fascinating and inspiring read.' -- David Pike The Wittnes 20100922 'This excellent book by Anthony Lentin is in a series which concentrates on the men (including Smuts) who shaped the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War. Lentin not only describes Smuts' contribution in Paris, but he also outlines his life from farm boy of the Western Cape to his state funeral in Pretoria 80 years later. Lentin does this in less than 200 pages (excluding references and the index), which is a tribute to his clear, elegant and economical English style.' -- James Barber South African Journal of International Affairs