Margot Asquith's Great War Diary 1914-1916: The View from Downing Street - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198229771 ISBN 13: 9780198229773

Verlag: OUP Oxford, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

9780198229773, Margot Asquiths Great War Diary 1914-1916: The View From Downing Street by Michael Brock, Oxford University Press, Paperback

Über diesen Titel

Críticas

This book is full of minor gems, throwing light on the extraordinary domestic bubble within which the wartime premier operated... the editors have provided us with a rollicking good read! (Journal of Liberal History, David Dutton)

Mrs. Asquith's diaries are both entertainingly and splendidly edited by the late Michael Brock and his wife Eleanor and copious footnotes add hugely to the context, accuracy, and frequent inaccuracy, of the writings. Perhaps even more valuable than Margot's own record is the editors' 147-page introduction and its corrective to the reputation of her husband Herbert, and the events of his wartime premiership and government. (Stand-To: Magazine of The Western Front Association, David Filsell)

The diaries may be 100 years old, but political life has changed little, it seems. (Suffolk & Norfolk Life, Chris Green)

Margot Asquith's long-awaited Great War Diary 1914-16 edited by Michael and Eleanor Brock takes the lid of No. 10 during Asquith's difficult wartime premiership, and gives a compelling picture of Liberal England and the belle epoque in meltdown under the nightmare stresses of a war that no one could have predicted or planned for. (Jane Ridley, Book of the Year 2014, Spectator)

The diaries never cease to entertain, and they turn out to be remarkably enlightening too. (London Review of Books, Ferdinand Mount)

Lovingly edited (Andy McSmith, Independent)

Sharply observant, witty, tactless, idiosyncratic, lacking in judgment, acerbic, invariably wrong headed in her loudly voiced opinions, Margot Asquith, was a peerless diarist. With her ringside seat as the wife of the Prime Minister, H. H Asquith, her writing adds an incomparable dimension to our understanding of politics and society during the First World War, its heroes and its incompetents. Superb. (Juliet Gardiner)

Margot Asquith's Great War Diary provides lively and outspoken comments on many of the leading personalities of the era. (Ronald Quinault, History Today)

In a mass of new volumes on the First World War, Margot Asquith's diaries stand out. (Oldie)

This is one diary that pulls no punches. (Steve Craggs, Northern Echo)

Reseña del editor

Margot Asquith was the wife of Herbert Henry Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister who led Britain into war in August 1914. Asquith's early war leadership drew praise from all quarters, but in December 1916 he was forced from office in a palace coup, and replaced by Lloyd George, whose career he had done so much to promote. Margot had both the literary gifts and the vantage point to create, in her diary of these years, a compelling record of her husband's fall from grace. She once described herself as 'a sort of political clairvoyant', but she did not anticipate the premier's fall, and it is for her candour, not her clairvoyance, that the diary is valuable.

Margot was both a spectator of, and a participant in, the events that she describes, and in public affairs could be an ally or an embarrassment - sometimes both. Her diary evokes the wartime milieu, as experienced in 10 Downing Street, and describes the great political battles that lay behind the warfare on the Western Front. Her writing teems with character sketches, including those of Lloyd George ('a natural adventurer who may make or mar himself any day'), Churchill ('Winston's vanity is septic'), and Kitchener ('a man brutal by nature and by pose'). Witty and worldly, Margot also possessed a childlike vulnerability: 'This is the 84th day of the war' she wrote in October 1914, 'and speaking for myself I have never felt the same person since. I don't mean to say I have improved! On the contrary...'.

This volume brings together a wealth of previously-unpublished source material with an introductory essay from Michael and Eleanor Brock, two of the leading authorities in the field. This will be vital reading for anyone with an interest in the history of World War I or in British politics of the time.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: OUP Oxford
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0198229771
• ISBN 13: 9780198229773
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 568
• Herausgeber: Brock Michael, Brock Eleanor