ABSTRACT
‘If men will not learn until their lessons are written in blood, why, blood they must have, their own for preference’, wrote Bernard Shaw in 1918 introducing Heartbreak House, his great play on the decadent Europe from which had sprung the Great War. In contrast to those who learned from the First World War simply how much better to prepare for a Second, there stood in Western Europe and America in 1945 a new class of politicians, high civil servants and experts determined not just that this time ‘never again’ would mean what it said, but that the survival of liberal civilisation itself demanded a positive, constructive response equal in scale to the disasters of the previous three decades.
