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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

24 August 2024

9:00 AM

24 August 2024

9:00 AM

Precipice Robert Harris

Hutchinson Heinemann, pp.464, 22

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.

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