the United States ambassador to Spain and Governor-General of the Philippines. His parents and other family members moved temporarily to London at the outbreak of war. During the war he was in a British Ambulance Corps, until invalided out; he was then sent to Washington, D.C. to help the British Ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, soften Irish-American hostility towards England and obtain American intervention in the war in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and the execution of its leaders. But he also looked to Ireland for inspiration when writing and edited a literary magazine that contained much Irish verse. He became a supporter of the ideals of Irish nationalism, although not physical force republicanism. In the 1918 election the Irish Parliamentary Party lost massively to Sinn Féin, putting an end to Shane Leslie's political career, but as the first cousin of Winston Churchill he remained a primary witness to much that was said and done outside the official record during the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Disappointed, he felt unwanted in Ireland and abandoned by the British. Like many members of the landed gentry from the 1880s who were obliged to turn to other occupations, he could no longer rely on income from landholdings. He wrote extensively, in a wide range of styles, in verse, prose, and polemic, over several decades. His writings include The End of a Chapter (1916), while hospitalised during the Great War, The Oppidan (1922), a roman à clef about his life and contemporaries at Eton, an edition of the Letters of Herbert Cardinal Vaughan to Lady Herbert of Lea (1942), and a biography Mrs Fitzherbert: a life chiefly from unpublished sources (1939), together with an edition of her letters (with Maria Anne Fitzherbert), The letters of Mrs Fitzherbert and connected papers; being the second volume of the life of Mrs. Fitzherbert (1944). He also wrote Mark Sykes: His Life and Letters (1923), a biography of the English traveller, Conservative Party politician and diplomatic advisor.He advised budding novelist Scott Fitzgerald on the title of his 1st novel,they shared correspondence with the future Mnsg William A Hemmick who was Fitzgerald's teacher at the now shut Newman School. A passionate advocate of reforestation, he found the business of running an estate uncreative and boring, and transferred the estate entailed to him to his eldest son, John Norman Leslie, who succeeded as the