Support truly
independent journalism
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.
