Raymond Asquith: Life and Letters

A long-anticipated reissue of the letters of one of the most enigmatic characters the ‘Corrupt Coterie’ of World War I. Eldest son of the Prime Minister, with an outstanding academic record at Oxford, Raymond Asquith devoted his great talents to friendship, preferring conversation and literature to the struggle for worldly success. In this collection, edited by his grandson, there are touching and revealing letters to friends as diverse as Winston Churchill and Lady Diana Cooper, love letters to his wife, Katherine, as well as frank and witty anecdotes about many of the major social figures and politicians of the day. His letters from the Western Front, before his death on the Somme in 1916, are as memorable as anything in the painfully emotive literature of the period. AUTHOR: John Jolliffe, now retired, was the editorial director of Constable for eight years, and was also the author or editor of five previous books on historical subjects, including The Diaries of Benjamin Haydon and The Chronicles of Froissart. He has been a regular reviewer for The Spectator and Salisbury Reviewer, and has also contributed to Wall Street Journal, Daily Telegraph and Independent. SELLING POINTS: . ‘My brilliant hero friend’
Winston Churchill about Raymond Asquith . ‘Witty, informed, acid and deliciously frank about his famous contemporaries’
The Times . ‘His descriptions of the conditions in the trenches and his comments on the general organisation are bitingly witty and shrewd’
Evening Standard . ‘Depicts more elegantly and eloquently than a dozen lesser volumes the lives, standards, hopes and tragic ends of almost an entire generation - a superb book’
Sunday Express . 7,000 copies sold, and picked as ‘book of the year’ by Roy Jenkins and Hugh Trevor-Roper