Samuel, Viscount
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1870-1963) UK politician, of progressive Liberal principles, and author; he was born Herbert Louis Samuel, knighted 1920, and made Viscount Samuel on 8 June 1937. His somewhat humourless public personality was satirized by H G Wells in The New Machiavelli (1911), and the notoriously antisemitic Hilaire Belloc also attacked him, accusing him falsely of corruption, which forced him to sue, successfully, for libel. As high commissioner 1920-1925 of Palestine, he was involved in the first stages of the establishment of Israel. Most of his writings were nonfiction; of sf interest is An Unknown Land (1942) a Utopia based on Sir Francis Bacon's Atlantis (1626), and set (like its model) on an Island in the South Pacific, whose discovery by the current book's protagonist makes The Unknown Land into a kind of Lost Race tale. Over the centuries, strong applications of philosophy have solved various economic and moral dilemmas. [JC]
Herbert Louis Samuel, first Viscount Samuel
born Sefton Park, Toxteth, Liverpool: 6 November 1870
died London: 5 February 1963
works (highly selected)
- An Unknown Land (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942) [hb/Arthur C Turner]
links
previous versions of this entry