The great little Welsh conjuror
From our UK edition
It is a discomforting thought that, had the present fashion for kiss-and-tell memoirs, or the intense media scrutiny of politicians' private lives, been in place a century ago, David Lloyd George might never have become prime minister. Yet, as this masterly fourth volume in John Grigg's biography proves, he was a towering figure in exceptional times. Grigg picks up his story with Lloyd George's arrival in office in December 1916. Things were at a very low ebb in the war - the troops mired in Flanders, the Somme a dreadful and present memory, and Britain's very existence threatened by the submarine war being launched by Germany to cut our oceanic life-lines.