Portrait of a Decision : The Council of Four and the Treaty of Versailles

First published in 1972, Portrait of a Decision drawing on materials like- Cabinet minutes, the Lloyd George and Lothian papers, Foreign Office correspondence- provides the first comprehensive reassessment of the negotiations in Paris since those who were present wrote their memoirs. The making of the Treaty of Versailles was a watershed between the diplomatic worlds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An enormously wide-ranging piece of diplomatic negotiation, it largely determined the shape of the modern international world.

This book makes an attempt to portray the personalities and attitudes of the four principal actors in the drama: Woodrow Wilson, George Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Orlando. It was to be their decisions on such crucial questions as war guilt and reparations, military occupation, the redrawing of national boundaries and the application of the ‘Fourteen Points’, and the setting up of the League of Nations, which set the scene for the turbulence of the next two decades. This historical reference work is a must read for scholars and researchers of international relations, history, European history, modern history and diplomacy and strategic studies.