Talk:Fairfax Leighton Cartwright

Questionable interpretation

The intepretation of Cartwright in this article seems simplistic with an implicit assumption that Germany was to blame for the First World War. Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers describes him as follows:

The accession of Sir Edward Grey to the office of foreign secretary in December 1905 consolidated the influence of an emergent anti-German faction within the British Foreign Office. Grey's associates and subordinates supplied him with a steady stream of memos and minutes warning of the threat posed by Berlin. Dissenting voices within the Foreign Office were marginalized. Dispatches from British envoys in Germany that went against the grain of the dominant view, like those filed by Lascelles, De Salis and Goschen in Berlin, were plastered with skeptical marginalia when they reached London. By contrast the reports of Sir Fairfax Cartwright in Munich and later Vienna, which never failed to put the maximum negative spin on contemporary developments in Germany and Austria, were welcomed with accolades: 'An excellent and valuable report in all respects', 'Most interesting and well worth reading', 'An interesting and shrewd despatch'...... (Clark 2012, 160-161). He did try to detach Austria-Hungary from the German alliance but his hostility to Germany wasn't necessarily objectively grounded.