Jane Ridley
Our Woman in Number 10
Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914–1916: The View from Downing Street
By Michael Brock & Eleanor Brock (edd)
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.
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