The Businessman

Lloyd George

From Good-Bye to All That, by Robert Graves:

Later, in London, my father took me to a dinner of the Honourable Cymmrodorion Society—a Welsh literary club—where Lloyd George, then Secretary for War, and W. M. Hughes, the Australian Prime Minister, both spoke. Hughes was perky, dry and to the point; Lloyd George was up in the air on one of his `glory of the Welsh hills' speeches. The power of his rhetoric amazed me. The substance of the speech might be commonplace, idle and false, but I had to fight hard against abandoning myself with the rest of his audience. He sucked power from his listeners and spurted it back at them. Afterwards, my father introduced me to Lloyd George, and when I looked closely into his eyes they seemed like those of a sleepwalker.