The topic of the 1932 Conway Memorial Lecture was ‘Nationalism and the Future of Civilisation’. The lecture was delivered, as always, at Conway Hall, the home of the South Place Ethical Society, and still, as the advertisements in the progressive press tell us, an important venue of London progressive life.

The lecture contained few if any arguments that its audience would not have heard before. The speaker told them first that nationalism had a definite positive role: ‘The suppression of the [national] yearning to be free always poisons the well-springs of the body politic … Whatever the loss of administrative efficiency, a nation that is deprived of the right to determine its own way of life suffers an abridgment of personality which, sooner or later, issues in violence.’ Some of those phrases doubtless warmed the hearts of the very oldest members of the audience, and they, along with those a decade or two their juniors, would certainly have felt a glow of nostalgic indignation as the speaker continued: ‘The arts of propaganda are exhausted in the effort to persuade us that some particular search for profits is a holy war … We did that in the South African War.