E. H. Carr was one of the most influential theorists of international relations, and his works are widely read by students of the subject. By examining the political context in which he wrote, this book offers a radical reinterpretation of his work.

E. H. Carr is widely remembered as an influential theorist of international relations. The scourge of inter-war idealists, he became the best-known Briton in a generation of predominantly American political realists. But Carr's realism differed greatly from that of his contemporaries: a vigorous advocate of social and economic planning and friend of the Soviet Union, he stood closer to Lenin than to Morgenthau. In this book Charles Jones makes sense of Carr's distinctive form of realism by examining his rhetoric and the reciprocal relationship between theory and policy-making in his writings. Close attention is paid to the period from 1936, when Carr left the Foreign Office, through his subsequent career as a one-man foreign ministry at Aberystwyth, the Ministry of Information, and above all The Times, culminating in the final frustration of his schemes for continued British world power in 1947.