The letters and documents in this volume were written between January 1917 and June 1919, the period covered in the first part of Volume IV of the Churchill biography. This volume also includes the Introduction and Acknowledgements for the succeeding two volumes (9 and 10). For Churchill, the period was dominated first by the need to defeat Germany, then by he post-war settlement and the Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia, and by a growing personal awareness of the strong forces of disruption and chaos with which the early years of the Twentieth Century were being threatened.