The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs
Cód:
491_9781443725491
The Memoirs Of Sir Ronald Storrs. PREFACE: THIS has not been been an easy book to write. My books and papers were destroyed by fire with the rest of my property in 1931, so that of material, consciously prepared or preserved as such, I have none. I had, however, the habit ever since leaving England in 1904 of writing weekly to my mother, and of enclosing briefly minuted items I thought might entertain her. All these documents she kept with my letters, including a few diaries of special missions or journeys during the Wan In the longest of these, describing Baghdad in 1917, she inked over my pencil version with the result, as in a palimpsest, that some of the words she could not read then I cannot decipher now. These surviving records I have wherever possible quoted in original with, I hope, a gain in immediacy and actuality by recording not only historic facts, sometimes already known, but also my feelings at the time with stories and details, trifling in themselves yet constituting atmosphere the hardest of all things to recapture after many years. There are no corrections but many omissions, especially of personal remarks intended only for home consumption. The retention of many faults of youthful slang and flippancy proceeds not so much from any illusion as to their intrinsic demerits as from a preference for the varied patina of the past over the shiny smoothness of a Vernis Martin surface. The loss of a slowly collected library bearing on the chief interests of a mans life is a handicap, less only than the loss of serious docu ments. Not total replacement, not even the Socialist ideal of the British Museum Library access to everything, possession of nothing can recall the annotations and cross-references of many years. In a book full of Oriental names it is impossible to avoid the vexed question of transliteration. That is a subject upon which, as indicated, I have strong ideas and even stronger feelings. In 1920 Sir Herbert Samuel made me Chairman of a small C
Veja mais
