Like his friends Leslie Stephen and Theodore Roosevelt, James Bryce combined an active physical life of hiking and climbing with an active intellectual life as historian of ideas and political theorist. He had the peculiarly Victorian gift of combining devotion to nature with an equally strong devotion to ideas. Active is perhaps too tame a word to describe the man who was a professor at Oxford, member of Parliament, president of the Alpine Society, chief secretary for Ireland, British ambassador to the United States, mediator in United States--Canada relations, significant voice in the development of the League of Nations, and traveler to practically every part of the world.

Bryce organized his travels in conjunction with official business or during brief summer breaks, so his writings are rarely localized, day-to-day descriptions of places and people. They thus lack the color and human interest of the works of Sir Richard...