Jonathan Boff

A romantic obsession: Precipice, by Robert Harris, reviewed

In the build-up to the Great War another drama unfolds, as the Prime Minister H.H. Asquith is seen to be distracted from politics by his infatuation with the beautiful Venetia Stanley

A colourised photograph of Venetia Stanley. [Alamy] 
issue 24 August 2024

London in the long hot summer of 1914. A city of gold sovereigns, chaperones and muffin men, but also a place where war looms, paranoia breeds and secret papers mysteriously disappear. The world that Robert Harris brings to life in Precipice is both close to that of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and simultaneously very far away. In place of rugged heroes giving dastardly spies what for, he offers a subtle drama about the distasteful and ultimately destructive love affair between a young aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, and a man 35 years her senior who, not coincidentally, happens to be the prime minister H.H. Asquith.

When the book opens, a few days after the assassination at Sarajevo, we find Asquith preoccupied not with the danger of conflict on the Continent but with the prospect of civil war in Ireland. The outbreak of the Great War temporarily shelves the Irish problem, to Asquith’s relief, even if it generates many far greater challenges too.

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