One of the most anguished documents in Violet Asquith’s papers at the Bodleian Library is a note on a small card in the hand of her father, H H Asquith, the prime minister. ‘Don’t go away from me now – I need you,’ it reads. Undated, it was written around 15 May 1915. A day or two later, Asquith told Violet, ‘This has been the worst week of my life.’ The week began with Asquith’s son Oc being wounded at Gallipoli. Then came the bizarre resignation of the First Sea Lord, Admiral ‘Jackie’ Fisher, and the bitter blow of Asquith being forced to take Conservatives into his government. Overshadowing all this was turmoil in Asquith’s private life. 

This one week forms the climax of Precipice, Robert Harris’s latest historical thriller. The novel takes the relationship between Asquith and Violet’s great friend Venetia Stanley and makes the bold claim that it shaped history. The story hangs on the proposition that, because he became obsessed with Venetia, a woman young enough to be his daughter, Asquith led his country to near disaster. Using the rise and fall of the relationship between Venetia and the man she fondly called ‘prime’ as a narrative theme, Harris reconstructs, in claustrophobic detail, the extraordinary months in which the post-Edwardian world began to disintegrate.

Harris was inspired to write Precipice by the published letters of Asquith to Venetia, and the novel explores the figures behind them, illustrating both the depth of Asquith’s entanglement with her and – although this is by inference, because Venetia’s actual letters to Asquith do not survive – her increasing