Friends, rivals and countrymen

This is an ideal John Murray book, dealing with historic personalities, with a narrative reinforced by family papers and an understanding deepened by family connection. Robert Lloyd George, the author, is the great-grandson of David Lloyd George, the prime minister. I hope it will be a best- seller, and can imagine it being un- wrapped, with real pleasure, from parcels beneath half the Christmas trees of Old England.

What is surprising is that a book on this friendship has never been written before. David Lloyd George was the prime minister who won the first world war; Winston Churchill was the prime minister who won the second. They served together in the Asquith government before 1914, which, along with the Attlee and Thatcher administrations, can claim to be one of the three great peacetime governments of 20th- century Britain. That Liberal government created the first welfare state.

They were close personal friends, a relationship which survived for more than 40 years.