If Love Were All...
  • Published: 20 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9781784705176
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 592
  • RRP: $48.00
Categories:

If Love Were All...

The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George

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An extraordinary drama of passion and sacrifice at the very heart of the British government, as told by one of the great political biographers of our time.

In the summer of 1911 David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, hired a young schoolteacher called Frances Stevenson to tutor his daughter in the summer holidays. He was forty-eight, and married with four children. She was twenty-two, highly intelligent as well as very attractive, and Lloyd George soon began to employ her as his secretary.

At the beginning of 1913 they became lovers, on terms spelt out by Lloyd George with ruthless clarity. Their secret relationship was to last for thirty years until his wife's death finally allowed Lloyd George to marry her in 1943.

Combining sex, romance, family feuds and high politics- based on letters, diaries and a vast range of material, published and unpublished - If Love Were All... is the first detailed study of this extraordinary relationship, one that was known about by everyone in politics but never revealed in the press, and the strains that it placed on both parties.
  • Published: 20 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9781784705176
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 592
  • RRP: $48.00
Categories:

About the author

John Campbell

John Campbell is the author of many biographies including one of Edward Heath, for which he won the 1994 NCR award, The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, from Grocer's Daughter to Iron Lady and, most recently, Pistols at Dawn: Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown. He is married and lives in Kent.

portrait photo of John Campbell

Also by John Campbell

The Iron Lady
Roy Jenkins
Edward Heath
Pistols at Dawn
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher Volume Two
See all

Praise for If Love Were All...

Fascinating... John Campbell has an extraordinary story to tell and he tells it with great skill and authority... Gripping

Jane Ridley, Literary Review

Judicious, workmanlike and thorough

Hilary Spurling, Observer

Campbell's pacily written book is tantalising. It is the sheer quantity of material, with hundreds of letters and diary entries comprehensively transcribed, that makes this rather prurient volume possible

Chris Bryant, The Independent

Elegant... [Campbell] makes an excellent fist of it, using innumerable letters and diaries to produce an engrossing, judicious read

Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

A book that is by turns compulsively readable and deeply enlightening about the character of one of our greatest Prime Ministers

Independent on Sunday