Curzon, George Nathaniel, 1st Marquis Curzon

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Curzon, George Nathaniel, 1st Marquis Curzon (1859–1925). Curzon became an authority on the East through travelling extensively in the 1880s, and a passionate advocate of British imperial power. His main contribution to that came when he was sent to India as viceroy in 1899, where he worked hard to further the interests—as he saw them—of both Britain and the natives, and in some splendour. He also quarrelled with his army commander, Lord Kitchener; and with most of the population of Bengal by partitioning the province in 1905. His resignation later that year was accompanied by bitterness, and followed by a period of exclusion from public life, under an unsympathetic Liberal government, until the First World War resurrected his career in 1916. After the war he was foreign secretary (1919–24), but again quarrelsome; and was disappointed at not becoming prime minister in 1923. His earldom came in 1911, the marquisate in 1921. He had a reputation for arrogance and inflexibility, which some attributed to a painful spinal condition which required him to wear a corset for most of his life.

Bernard Porter

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