Jane Ridley

Our Woman in Number 10

Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914–1916: The View from Downing Street

By

Oxford University Press 417pp £30 order from our bookshop

This book has been over thirty years in the making. Back in 1982 Michael Brock and his wife Eleanor published an important edition of the letters Herbert Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley while prime minister. Mark Bonham Carter, who owned Margot Asquith’s papers, then asked the Brocks to prepare an edition of Margot’s diaries. They fill twenty-two large volumes and provide an incredibly rich seam of society gossip and political intelligence from the inside. For decades people have been waiting for the Brocks to finish their work. Michael Brock died in April this year. Weeks after his ninety-fourth birthday he was still correcting the proofs of this book. Out of the mountain of Margot’s papers there has appeared a mouse: one volume covering the two wartime years of Asquith’s premiership.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The lack of evidence ... of any definitive brain pathology in cases of schizophrenia and the absence of any reliab… ,
    • 'Since Dylan’s commercial and ideological heyday, the intrusion of sociology, semiology and post-structuralist thou… ,
    • 'One of the reasons for its longevity is that it has virtually nothing to say about science and technology at all,… ,
    • 'The characters in many of these stories are trapped in the obsessive present tense of their own thoughts; in the m… ,
    • 'Libraries, for much of their existence, have embodied in microcosm many of the characteristics of the totalitarian… ,
    • 'Moss and Cynthia buy several properties through which to launder their ill-gotten gains, take lots of drugs, have… ,
    • 'Never mind the imperial cult. This is the cult of Boris. What happened to Rome?' From the LR archive:… ,
    Follow Us