Margot At War

Margot Asquith was perhaps the most daring and unconventional Prime Minister's wife in British history. Known for her wit, style and habit of speaking her mind, she transformed 10 Downing Street into a glittering social and intellectual salon. Yet her last four years at Number 10 were a period of intense emotional and political turmoil in her private and public life. In 1912 rumblings of discontent and cries for social reform were encroaching on all sides - from suffragettes, striking workers and Irish nationalists. Against this background of a government beset with troubles, the Prime Minister fell desperately in love with his daughter's best friend, Venetia Stanley; to complicate matters, so did his Private Secretary. Margot's relationship with her husband was already bedevilled by her stepdaughter's jealous adoration of her father. The outbreak of the First World War only heightened these swirling tensions within Downing Street. Drawing on unpublished material from personal papers and diaries, Anne de Courcy vividly recreates this extraordinary time when the Prime Minister's residence was run like an English country house, with socialising taking precedence over politics, love letters written in the cabinet room and gossip and state secrets exchanged over the bridge table.

An unconventional view of the First World War from inside the glittering social salon of Downing Street: a story of unrequited love, loss, sacrifice, scandal and the Prime Minister's wife, Margot Asquith. Margot Asquith was perhaps the most daring and unconventional Prime Minister's wife in British history. Known for her wit, style and habit of speaking her mind, she transformed 10 Downing Street into a glittering social and intellectual salon. Yet her last five years at Number 10 were a period of intense emotional and political turmoil in her private and public life. In 1912, when Anne de Courcy's book opens, rumblings of discontent and cries for social reform were encroaching on all sides - from suffragettes, striking workers and Irish nationalists. Against this background of a government beset with troubles, the Prime Minister fell desperately in love with his daughter's best friend, Venetia Stanley; to complicate matters, so did his Private Secretary. Margot's relationship with her husband was already bedevilled by her stepdaughter's jealous, almost incestuous adoration of her father. The outbreak of the First World War only heightened these swirling tensions within Downing Street. Drawing on unpublished material from personal papers and diaries, Anne de Courcy vividly recreates this extraordinary time when the Prime Minister's residence was run like an English country house, with socialising taking precedence over politics, love letters written in the cabinet room and gossip and state secrets exchanged over the bridge table. By 1916, when Asquith was forced out of office, everything had changed. For the country as a whole, for those in power, for a whole stratum of society, but especially for the Asquiths and their circle, it was the end of an era. Life inside Downing Street would never be the same again.

Margot Asquith was the wife of Herbert Henry Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister who led Britain into war in August 1914. Asquith's early war leadership drew praise from all quarters, but in December 1916 he was forced from office in a palace coup, and replaced by Lloyd George, whose career he had done so much to promote. Margot had both the literary gifts and the vantage point to create, in her diary of these years, a compelling record of her husband's fall from grace. An intellectual socialite with the airs, if not the lineage, of an aristocrat, Margot was both a spectator and a participant in the events she describes, and in public affairs could be an ally or an embarrassment - sometimes both. Her diary vividly evokes the wartime milieu as experienced in 10 Downing Street, and describes the great political battles that lay behind the warfare on the Western Front, in which Asquith would himself lose his eldest son. The writing teems with character sketches, including Lloyd George ('a natural adventurer who may make or mar himself any day'), Churchill ('Winston's vanity is septic'), and Kitchener ('a man brutal by nature and by pose'). Never previously published, this candid, witty, and worldly diary gives us a unique insider's view of the centre of power, and an introduction by Michael Brock, in addition to explanatory footnotes and appendices written with his wife Eleanor, provide the context and background information we need to appreciate them to the full.

Margot Asquith was perhaps the most daring and unconventional Prime Minister's wife in British history. Known for her wit, style and habit of speaking her mind, she transformed 10 Downing Street into a glittering social and intellectual salon. Yet her last four years at Number 10 were a period of intense emotional and political turmoil in her private and public life. In 1912, when Anne de Courcy's book opens, rumblings of discontent and cries for social reform were encroaching on all sides - from suffragettes, striking workers and Irish nationalists. Against this background of a government beset with troubles, the Prime Minister fell desperately in love with his daughter's best friend, Venetia Stanley; to complicate matters, so did his Private Secretary. Margot's relationship with her husband was already bedevilled by her stepdaughter's jealous, almost incestuous adoration of her father. The outbreak of the First World War only heightened these swirling tensions within Downing Street. Drawing on unpublished material from personal papers and diaries, Anne de Courcy vividly recreates this extraordinary time when the Prime Minister's residence was run like an English country house, with socialising taking precedence over politics, love letters written in the cabinet room and gossip and state secrets exchanged over the bridge table. By 1916, when Asquith was forced out of office, everything had changed. For the country as a whole, for those in power, for a whole stratum of society, but especially for the Asquiths and their circle, it was the end of an era. Life inside Downing Street would never be the same again.

Diary of the wife of Herbert Henry Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister who lead Great Britain during the first two years of World War I. Covers the early war years and Lloyd George's defeat of Asquith's government in December 1916.

An "important" (New York Times Book Review), "extraordinary" (Booklist, starred review) novel of conviction, friendship, and betrayal, from Monica Hesse, the bestselling and award-winning author of Girl in the Blue Coat "A must-read for fans of historical fiction." --Ruta Sepetys, #1 New York Times bestselling author It's 1944, and World War II is raging across Europe and the Pacific. The war seemed far away from Margot in Iowa and Haruko in Colorado--until they were uprooted to dusty Texas, all because of the places their parents once called home: Germany and Japan. Haruko and Margot meet at the high school in Crystal City, a "family internment camp" for those accused of colluding with the enemy. The teens discover that they are polar opposites in so many ways, except for one that seems to override all the others: the camp is changing them, day by day and piece by piece. Haruko finds herself consumed by fear for her soldier brother and distrust of her father, who she knows is keeping something from her. And Margot is doing everything she can to keep her family whole as her mother's health deteriorates and her rational, patriotic father becomes a man who distrusts America and fraternizes with Nazis. With everything around them falling apart, Margot and Haruko find solace in their growing, secret friendship. But in a prison the government has deemed full of spies, can they trust anyone--even each other? *Don't miss Monica Hesse's New York Times bestselling historical mysteries, Girl in the Blue Coat and They Went Left*

The twentieth century will be remembered for great innovation in two particular areas: art and culture, and technological advancement. Much of its prodigious technical inventiveness, however, was pressed into service in the conduct of warfare. Why, asks Margot Norris, did violence and suffering on such an immense scale fail to arouse artistic and cultural expressions powerful enough to prevent the recurrence of these horrors? Why was art not more successful--through its use of dramatic, emotionally charged material, its ability to stir imagination and arouse empathy and outrage--in producing an alternative to the military logic that legitimates war? Military argument in the twentieth century has been fortified by the authority of the rationalism that we attribute to science, Norris argues. Warfare is therefore legitimized by powerful discourses that art's own arsenal of styles and genres has limited power to counter. Art's difficulty in representing the violent death of entire generations or populations has been particularly acute. Choosing works that have become representative of their historically violent moment, Norris explores not only their aesthetic strategies and perspectives but also the nature of the power they wield and the ethical engagements they enable or impede. She begins by mapping the altered ethical terrain of modern technological warfare, with its increasing targeting of civilian populations for destruction. She then proceeds historically with chapters on the trench poetry and modernist poetry of World War I, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, both the book and the film of Schindler's List, the conflicting historical stories of the Manhattan Project, a comparison of American and Japanese accounts of Hiroshima, Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, and the effects of press censorship in the Persian Gulf War. By looking at the whole span of the century's writing on war, Norris provides a fascinating critique of art's ethical power and limitations, along with its participation in--as well as protest against--the suffering that human beings have brought upon themselves.

Nicholas Rohloffsen is ashamed of himself. Although he was doggedly loyal to his wife until her death nine weeks earlier, he cannot stop thinking about Margot Renard, the much older woman who possessed his heart when he was a younger man. Nicholass quest to find her soon leads him to a retirement home where he proclaims he is the distant cousin of the recently deceased composer, Victor Rohloffsen, and is searching for more information about his past relationship with Margot. But his reason for visiting is barely true, if true at all. As he sets out to prove that a widowed resident, Katherine Anne Kendall, is really Margot, Nicholas is led down an unexpected path where he finally learns the fascinating truth about why she once suffered, how she somehow found refuge from her pain through furious play and study of classical piano, and why some casualties of the war were not on the front lines. Margots War reveals a widowers journey back into the past as he searches for the woman who once captured his heart and, in the process, uncovers a complex chain of events that reveal the truth.