The British historian and political journalist George Peabody Gooch (1873-1968) is noted for his work on historiography and diplomatic history.

Born to a middle-class London family in 1873, George Gooch was fortunate, as he once remarked, to have been born with "a warm heart, an inquiring mind, and an adequate income." After studying at Eton, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he spent the autumn of 1895 in Berlin. That same year he made the acquaintance of Lord Acton, who guided the young historian's work for the next 5 years. In 1896 Gooch attended lectures at the Sorbonne and the School of Political Science in Paris. In 1903 he married Sophie Schoen.

Gooch's first work, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (1898), in which he viewed even the most fanatical of his historical subjects with liberal toleration, is a classic in its field. Politics, however, soon drew him away from scholarly pursuits. The crisis...