By whom? Robert Harris.

Published when? 2024.

Read why? 1. I kept seeing recommendations for Robert Harris (for example, he's "one of our favourite writers here at Five Books for his page-turners that rely on historical sources"). 2. Various other Harris titles were already on my TBR list, but this was the one that came up in the op shop... Thus it is with many of my book choices. They're rarely a product of careful programming. Mostly, they're a combo of inclination and opportunity...

About what? Well, it's an extraordinary tale. Take one British prime minister, in his sixties, married with a family, and have him fall in love with a young aristocrat, in her late twenties. Have him write and talk to her in great detail about affairs of state, revealing secrets as though he's shelling peas; sending her original, confidential documents to back up his points; and throwing the carbon copies out of the window of the 1908 Napier in which he took her promenading every Friday afternoon (prompting a police investigation). Make this whole scenario particularly alarming because Britain is about to embark on a major conflict. Then have him become more and more possessive and jealous of the young woman's time and emotions, so that eventually she feels she has to extricate herself from the affair by means of a somewhat unconventional marriage. Which all sounds pretty unlikely -- except it happened. The PM is Herbert Henry Asquith; the aristocrat is Venetia Stanley, a close friend of Asquith's daughter; the man she married was the PM's private secretary, Edwin Montagu; the major conflict in the offing is World War I... And as Harris tells us right at the beginning: "All the letters quoted in the text from the Prime Minister are -- the reader may be astonished to learn -- authentic." Many are being published for the first time.


I finished reading this book just as we were moving into our new house


The inside back cover shows Robert Harris, and snippets of Asquith's handwriting

***

I found this a gripping read. Harris aficionados say it's not as nail-biting as his other work, but I have nothing to compare it with, and I was riveted.

I didn't know the story, and all the way through I was commenting inwardly: This is ridiculous; what is the PM THINKING? How long can he get away with this? How long before this thing becomes public, and ruins his career?

Stanley is not the first favourite. Asquith is known for surrounding himself with young women. He's known for drinking too much. But this Stanley relationship leaps off the page because it is just so reckless, so extraordinarily OTT... And many know or suspect what is going on. There are people who observe that Asquith's mind is not always totally on his cabinet meetings because he's writing letters to Stanley. How long before someone blows the whistle?

And what about Stanley herself? She's bold, intelligent, energetic. She deserves so much more than this.

Harris introduces a fictional character, Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer, who is charged with monitoring Venetia Stanley's correspondence. This is a great device. On the one hand, he represents the common man, appalled at the antics and the invulnerability of the higher classes. On the other, he provides the vehicle by which we are made privy to the letters. His disbelief becomes ours.

For me, then, this was a brilliant read. And it's told with dignity, and with a laudable lack of censure. It's as though Harris is simply saying: This is what happened. Look and wonder.


Marching off to war. May we not be on the way to repeating this slide to the precipice...

***

Particular points to note:

1. Harris does the lead-up to WWI really well. And the terrifying progress of events is all the more meaningful in our own fraught context. The tendency is to think of WWI as unavoidable. The machine was set in motion, and it would tick down to the bitter end. But Precipice reminds us of the opportunities for intervention that were lost along the way.

At one point, the King is wheeled on: "Let's draft an appeal from the King to the Tsar, cousin to cousin."

And the government is not united. There are different factions, pro- and anti-war.

Winston Churchill (who doesn't come out of this book looking particularly good) is rabidly pro.

Asquith himself is cautious. At first, he can hardly believe the way events are trending: "The King had once been heard describing him as 'not a gentleman'... Could it be true that this sophisticated society which had enabled him to rise from a Yorkshire mill town to be head of His Majesty's Government was threatened by some fanatical assassin in the Balkans? Rothschild had said the crisis could be the end of Western civilisation. But that couldn't be right, could it?"

But as the process accelerates, he feels dread: "All across Europe, he thought -- everyone moving into position, everything tending in the same direction, towards the precipice. The world had gone mad."

He's not a war-monger. He has been dragged into this. And he feels it viscerally when actions start to go wrong. He writes to Venetia: "Strictly between ourselves, I can't tell you what I feel of the WICKED folly of it all... Nothing can excuse Winston... It was like sending sheep to the shambles."

Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, who became Secretary of State for War, believes from the beginning that the British should back the French, but he's wholly realistic about the German army's fine prospects in France. And he remains clear-sighted. When the PM expresses the idea that the war might go on until Christmas, Kitchener says it's likely to go on until 1917. And the deaths will be in the millions.

It's not long before Kitchener's views are justified: "There had been terrible fighting around Ypres. The army had lost thirteen thousand men in two weeks. It was a war unlike any other. Industrialised slaughter."


Haydock, January 2026

2. Precipice was a reminder of the "spy mania" that afflicted Britain before and during WWI. I first came across this while we were staying in Cromer, and wrote a couple of posts about it. Eventually, as Harris points out, it was considered that the safest thing to do was to intern every enemy national still at liberty: Some 24,000 men and 16,000 women (many of them at Knockaloe on the Isle of Man).

3. Asquith is a fascinating character. He's an old fool, clearly. But Harris paints him with considerable empathy. Deemer sees someone whose daily routine suggests insouciance, and whose moral judgement is flawed: "And yet... the man wasn't vicious. There was something tragic about him: those reams of poetry, that hopeless yearning."

He's an astute politician, and yet his relationship with Stanley testifies to a huge blind spot. He shared military secrets and coded documents with her, blind to the possibilities of espionage or blackmail; he forgot strategic information about ammunition supplies because he'd sent the relevant briefing document to Stanley.

She notes that he sometimes seemed to live in a "fantasy world". Challenged about the documents that have been found (the ones he carelessly threw out of the car window), the PM replies that his conscience is clear. In other words, he knows, but he doesn't know...

He fantasizes about throwing everything up, and joining Stanley in some romantic idyll. She is much clearer-headed: "No prime minister ever gave up power willingly, however much strain they were under: if that was in their nature they never would have acquired it in the first place. And if he was serious, what did he envisage? The two of them living in a little cottage somewhere? What about the scandal and the social ruin it would entail for her? That didn't seem to have entered his calculations..."



4. Vanessa Thorpe points out that previous accounts have always minimized Asquith's relationship with Stanley, dismissing it as "an insignificant dalliance or as mere platonic affection". This is partly because Asquith's published letters contained gaps... Having dug out more detail, Harris pushes back against the view that this was "more of a fantasy relationship than a real love affair", and asserts that it was a much bigger deal: "'I became fascinated by this aspect of Asquith’s story,' said Harris. 'We can account for so much of his time in the run-up to the first world war, but this enabled me to tell that story day by day through the 560 letters Venetia kept... He enjoyed talking to her because she was clever and not trying to get a job or anything... So I feel that Venetia, like so many significant women behind the scenes, has been somewhat excised from history. If nothing else, I hope my novel will help give her the place she deserves.'"

Stanley's daughter, Judy Montagu, showed Venetia's letters to Asquith's grandson, publisher Mark Bonham-Carter (actress Helena Bonham-Carter's uncle). This was in the early 1960s. The material was shared with Roy Jenkins, who had been commissioned to write Asquith's biography. "But the PM’s descendants kept control over what was used, and the affair was downplayed. The biography, published in 1964, describes the heated correspondence as 'both a solace and a relaxation, interfering with his duties no more than did Lloyd George’s hymn-singing or Churchill’s late-night conversation'. But Harris now knows that the PM once hoped to run away with Stanley and that when she broke off the affair in 1915 to marry his colleague, Edwin Montagu, he was deeply distressed, 'bordering on a temporary nervous breakdown'. Precipice ends with Asquith making the lonely decision to end Britain’s last Liberal government."

In both these senses, Precipice tries to redress the balance.

5. For a lovely gossipy bit of family history, full of Stanleys and Asquiths and Bonham-Carters and Churchills, see here.

***

All up, this was well researched, highly readable, interesting, and thought-provoking. I'm definitely game for more Robert Harris.