It's an injustice this novelist hasn't won more top prizes

Created from hundreds of reckless and secret-spilling letters prime minister HH Asquith sent to a socialite half his age at the dawn of the First World War, Robert Harris's 'Precipice' is his most enthralling novel yet

- Nicholas Coleridge

Robert Harris’s enthralling new novel may be one of his three best, and I write as someone who has read virtually all 16 of them. There was 1992’s Fatherland, imagining a world where the Nazis won the Second World War, and 2022’s Act of Oblivion, an epic set in the aftermath of the regicide of Charles I. And now there’s Precipice, in which he has found another slam dunk of a plot. It is based upon the true episode of 60-year-old prime minister HH Asquith’s infatuation with an aristocratic young woman 35 years his junior, to whom he wrote more than 700 letters over a three-year period – sometimes as many as three letters a day.

What makes the story so extraordinary is that Asquith was prime minister during the run-up to the First World War – and throughout those first two catastrophic years of combat – but still found time to compose handwritten notes during cabinet meetings in Downing Street; letters that became increasingly obsessive as the Great War progressed, and that frequently contained the most confidential information on British strategy and affairs of state.

With astonishing recklessness, the married Liberal PM enclosed top-secret dispatches from ambassadors, generals and royals to engage his paramour. The Hon Venetia Stanley, daughter of Lord Sheffield, was an unlikely recipient of his ardour: a lively, barely educated, time-rich socialite, living at home with her parents between two stately homes and a Mayfair mansion, awaiting a suitable husband. Today she would probably be an Instagram influencer, entitled but enticing.