Venetia Stanley

In 1949, aged 26, the bright, well-connected Judy Montagu (first cousin of Mary Churchill and friend of Princess Margaret) criss-crossed the United States on a Greyhound bus. The Greyhound Diary is a vivid and often humorous account of the three months she spent on the road. Montagu’s life, like her diary, reflects a specific time, place and atmosphere – that of postwar optimism, the disappearing shreds of aristocratic influence and a burgeoning interest in New Deal America. She was the epitome of the socialite whose sarcasm could be wielded like a scythe. At a luncheon in the American South, she meets a woman who tells her that she had once

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