- Speaker #0
Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, the show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.
- Speaker #1
Welcome. To the Not All Better show on radio and podcast, I'm your host, Paul Vogelsang. Today, we're diving into a world on the verge of collapse, where passion, politics, and peril collide. In the summer of 1914, the world was inching toward the Great War, and in the heart of Britain, secrets were being exchanged that could have changed everything. Join us as we talk today to our guest, the brilliant writer, Robert Harris, whose latest novel, precipice masterfully intertwines history and fiction to bring this harrowing moment to life. Robert Harris, renowned for his storytelling and meticulous research, takes us inside a clandestine affair between the British Prime Minister H.H. Esquith and the young aristocratic ingenue Venetia Stanley. But this is far more than a tale of forbidden love. It's a thriller that exposes the fragility of power, the dangerous intersection of personal and and political and how the secrets of a single woman could threaten an entire nation. And it is a true story. Prime Minister H.H. Asquith caught between his obsession for Venetia and his responsibility to lead a nation into war is a man crumbling under pressure. Meanwhile, Venetia, clever, bored, and reckless, is no victim but a woman caught in the very machinations of history at a time when women couldn't even vote. But as war clouds gather over Europe, This private intrigue becomes a national security risk and the stakes could not be higher. In Precipice, Robert Harris paints a vivid portrait of a society on the brink, capturing not just the politics but the people whose choices echo through history. Today we'll discuss the extraordinary research behind this novel, the real-life affair that could have toppled the government, and the timeless lessons it offers for our world today. We'll also discuss the new film Conclave, which is releasing in theaters November. This is the adaptation of Robert Harris's book, Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rosaliti. We'll have links so that our audience can find out more about this wonderful new film and the process involved in developing the wonderful new book, Precipice, how long it took, everything else that you're just going to love today. So join me as we step into a world of scandal, espionage, and war. Again, true story. To guide us through is the incomparable Robert Harris. This is the Not All Better Show on radio and podcast. Robert Harris, author of this wonderful new book, Precipice. Thanks for sharing it with me. Congratulations on the book and all you're doing, but welcome.
- Speaker #2
Thank you. Nice to be with you.
- Speaker #1
So nice to talk to you today. I love to learn about history and This book, I have to tell you, I learned so much about this period. We're talking about a period just before World War I. It's a fascinating time in history. Lots of parallels, I thought, between then and now. But what drew you to this particular period?
- Speaker #2
Well, I've always been interested in it, interested in this family called the Asquiths, who were, there were seven children, the prime minister from 1908 of Britain. They were highly talented, interesting crowd. And I thought of writing a kind of foresight saga kind of thing. But the most interesting thing really was that this dominant prime minister was having an affair with a young woman less than half his age. And I thought there was such an interesting period. The relationship between them was fascinating. And it's little known, as you say. And I thought, here's something a historical novelist can do. Because Asquith wrote, Venetia Stanley was the name of the girl. 560 letters and she kept every single one of them. She must have written 300 to him and he burnt every one of them. So I thought, well, I can do what a historian can't do. I can recreate her side of the correspondence.
- Speaker #1
Which is a wonderful part of this story because we get this other side that we would never have seen before. She's such a compelling character in the book and she has these interesting sides. She's rebellious yet. There's a part of her who still hasn't kind of quite developed her own agency, her own self of who she is. She's part of this larger group of intellectuals at the time. So she really has a lot going for her, although she exists in a world that's dominated certainly by male power around her. How did you approach bringing her to life in kind of that big way?
- Speaker #2
Well, I felt a lot of sympathy for her. As you say, when the book opens, she's 26. She's the daughter of a former Liberal Member of Parliament, very rich family, very, as you say, intellectual. Her father was an educationalist and had been an Oxford academic, but had lost his position because he declared that he didn't believe in God. His elder brother, was a Muslim sat in converted to Islam and sat in the House of Lords as a Muslim member. And his other brother, younger brother, was a Roman Catholic bishop. So they really did play every aspect. And she was sort of the youngest of the family and a bit lost, really. She didn't want to get married. She didn't much like children. She wanted to have a career. She was quite modern. And that's what appealed to me. I think she had this affair with the prime minister. I think she was fond of him. And I think she was probably the most well-informed woman in Britain because he told her everything. He shared all secrets with her. And this must have been a terrific thrill for her. I think, until it began to get too oppressive. And then she was trying to find a way out. So all this set against the world tipping over into the disaster of the First World War just made a compelling cocktail, I thought, of personal and political.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, it really was. I thought such a razor sharp portrayal of this woman, who is about half the age of the prime minister, Prime Minister Asquith, and still has some personal goals as well as some political goals going and interests certainly this really reflects broader theme that's going on within the tensions in britain at the time maybe describe that a little bit because i thought that was an interesting component of all of this
- Speaker #2
Yeah, we often think of the period just before the First World War as a kind of golden age, and in some ways it was. Britain was probably the zenith of its power. It's very much the kind of My Fair Lady, Ascot, Gavotte kind of world. But beneath this glittering surface, there were a lot of tensions. There were agitation for votes for women, of course, suffragettes. Women like Venetia didn't have the vote. There was industrial unrest. And of course, there was also this arms race between the major powers in Europe. in particular between Britain and Germany. So it's a sort of cauldron seething. There's all the art movement, the kind of modernism and so on. It's a very stirring time. And in July of 1914, everyone assumes that this world is going to carry on, a world of huge country houses and servants and so on, and a huge social divide. But no, there's an assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo and in Serbia. And suddenly... Within about two weeks, all these alliances begin to kick in and the European world begins to be dragged over the precipice, title of the novel, into the abyss. I try to have Asquith, who we're in his head, we're on his shoulder as he tries to grapple with this crisis, writing about a constellation of Anisha, going out with her, spending time with her, describing it all. And this was, for me, a way of dramatizing this incredible moment when the whole world... change. This is when the modern world begins really in 1914.
- Speaker #1
The new book, Precipice, just getting rave reviews. Thank you so much, Robert Harris, for joining us and for writing this fantastic book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I want to recommend it so highly. I'm not the only one. It's getting great reviews, as I say. I'll read Karen Slaughter's review. I loved what she had to say. It's just very right to the point. She just says, Robert Harris is simply put, masterful. The book is wonderful. And so congratulations again. Let's talk a little bit more about those letters, because as you say, Venetia Stanley saves all of hers and the prime minister burns his. So we get this real sense in the letters. It's actually kind of chilling about state secrets that are reflected and that are shared. This is really an interesting theme throughout the letters. What was going through his mind in kind of sharing this and thinking this and attempting and getting away with it even?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, this is what everyone wants to know, really. I mean, I should say to your listeners that, I mean, the novel is 120,000 words, but 5,000 or 6,000 of those words are actually Asquith. They are genuinely his letters. I was given permission to quote from them. And he wrote to her up to three times a day as Prime Minister. He'd write to her. late in the morning after the cabinet meeting and tell her what had happened, all the secrets, write to her at the end of the afternoon or early evening, maybe from his club. And then when he got into bed at midnight, he'd get out a pencil and he'd write in pencil to her whilst he was lying in bed. And there were 12 deliveries a day in London in 1914. So it was almost like the internet or WhatsAppping. They could maintain the constant flow of communication. And he sent her cabinet documents. He sent her... Among the papers which are lodged in the archive library in Oxford, it's stuffed with letters from Lord Kitchener, who was Secretary of State for War. There's a telegram from Winston Churchill, who was head of the Navy. There's a letter from Queen Mary. There are intelligence estimates. There's even a letter, a dispatch top secret from the commander of the British forces in France, giving his plans for the next day's deployment. He put these in the open post and sent them to her. And most amazingly of all, perhaps. They used to go for long drives together of a couple of hours every Friday afternoon. And he used to take documents to show in the back of the car, including the copies of telegrams from British ambassadors. These were decrypts. And he would show them to her and then he'd screw them up in a ball and throw them out of the window. And these were discovered by members of the public, handed into the police who handed them into the Foreign Office. And there was a kind of leak inquiry. And this was the other element of the novel. All right. The first thing was I wanted to recreate Venetia. But secondly, I realized there had been a leak inquiry. Someone had had to investigate this. And I thought, why don't I imagine that person, a policeman, as it happens. And he investigates the relationship between the two of them. So those are the three characters.
- Speaker #1
So let's talk a little bit about the policeman, because I thought he really was an interesting element in all of this. And he really serves as kind of a detective unearthing the story as it rolls along.
- Speaker #2
Yes, I couldn't really just have a novel of these two characters, Venetia and Asquith, exchanging letters. I needed some perspective on it. I needed someone to say, what the hell is going on here? To be, as it were, our voice. And this fairly lonely policeman who is assigned to special branch at Scotland Yard, which is in charge of diplomatic protection and security. is simply told to investigate what on earth are all these telegrams doing lying in fields around southern England. And he goes to the Foreign Office, he's fobbed off, he's not prepared to take the excuse, and so he presses on and he ends up monitoring their correspondence. Through his eyes, we can trace the development of the affair. I mean, the affair began really seriously at the beginning of 1914, I think, and went on until May 1915. So it straddles... appeared just before the war and then into the early months of the war when the stalemate began to settle on the Western Front and suddenly the casualties were appalling. It's the collapse of the old order, really, the slaughter on the battlefields, the cost, the economic cost, the disruption. Everything is going to change now. I mean, the two million men have enlisted to fight. Their places in factories have to be filled by, often by women. Suddenly, it becomes obvious women will have to now have the vote. A whole society is suddenly turned on its head.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, again, just a fascinating story. Robert Harris is our guest, author of the new book, Precipice. How did you research what was going on within the government at the time as a result of these letters? Because as the detective does his work, this starts to have an impact across society, as you suggest, but particularly within the government.
- Speaker #2
A lot of it, actually, suddenly comes to mask with himself because he, every day, told Venetia what was happening in his life. He was in love with her, and like people in love, he wanted to share everything that was happening to him. He wanted her to see it, share it. He relied on her advice quite a lot, and used it as a sounding board. So this is the most remarkable, I think, inside source of power and government that I can think of. It's the equivalent of a daily diary, so I was able to... I had quite an authentic feel of what was happening in the British government with colleagues. He meant the disputes with men like Churchill and Lloyd George and Kitchener. I could put all that in. I used a lot of contemporary documents, especially the Times newspaper, which was very good, had a lot of detailed accounts. And it's just an extraordinary and dramatic story. So as he grapples with all that, he is often away from him. The family had huge country estates. They had a house in Cheshire in the north of England with 65 bedrooms. I mean, an enormously wealthy family. And he went to visit her and it's possible for me to recreate his journeys. He traveled in those days. I don't know whether it would be the case for the American president in 1914, but Asquith, his prime minister, could travel unrecognized to London, walk the streets. didn't have a bodyguard of any sort. Often when he went to see Venetia, not even a private secretary. It's incredible to think of a prime minister at the height of a war being able to do this. But the fact that they were just beginning newsreels and so on, the kind of physical fame was not yet there for leaders.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, it was interesting to me too that that was the case so much so that he felt that he could just... discard these notes and letters out the window of a car as they travel together. And as you say, those were just the cover of the countryside and they could be collected and then dispersed and then shared. I mean, it really, you think about the record keeping that goes on today and the amount of documents that are recorded and documented themselves, and there's just this stark difference between the time periods.
- Speaker #2
Yes, it is a completely different world. I mean, what isn't different? Yeah. is the obsessive drive often of political leaders that is there in emotional or sexual life as well as in their political ambition. And I think another thing that people will feel is how on earth did they run such risks? And why do these political leaders run such risks with their private life of scandal? Especially in the case of Asquith because this woman He was 61, she was 26, she was a friend of his daughter, he knew her parents. It began to be whispered about among the circles in which they moved, which is one of the reasons why in the end she simply was desperate to find a way out of it. But at the same time, she didn't want to break his heart and distract him when he was the leader of the country. She almost felt I think it was her patriotic duty to carry on with the affair. This was her contribution to the war effort.
- Speaker #1
It was almost touching. There's almost this loyalty.
- Speaker #2
Yes, but she did try to fight. I mean, one of the things about the war, as I say, is it did provide women with an opportunity to broaden their horizons. And she trained to be a nurse, to go to the Western Front and nurse the wounded soldiers. An extraordinary thing would have been completely unthinkable in July 1914. But by December 1914, of course, this was what women were starting to do.
- Speaker #1
Her growth is really Impressive as a person, I mean, from this paramour, ingenue to a trained nurse, somebody who becomes really a professional. What was one of the letters, either scandalous or otherwise, that really grabbed your attention, that even surprised you in all of this collection?
- Speaker #2
The most startling letter I didn't come across until I'd almost finished the book, and actually it's the letter that ends the novel. It's a letter from Asquith to Venetia Stanley written about a week or so after she broke off their affair. She broke off their affair in May 1915, and this coincided with a double political crisis for Asquith. The first sea lord, Jackie Fisher, Lord Fisher, resigned in protest at this huge naval operation that Churchill had mounted in the Dardanelles of Turkey, which was turning into a disaster. In the end, it cost... the British alone, 32,000 dead in an utterly futile operation. And at the same time, there was a huge scandal about the shortage of ammunition on the Western Front. And so the government was rocking, she broke off their affair. He seems to have had a kind of mini nervous breakdown. At any rate, in less than a week, he invited the Conservatives opposition to join the Liberals in government to form a coalition. And that was the last time there was ever a Liberal government. So she was enormously consequential in British political history. And some historians have tried to play this down, but I did discover this letter in which he makes it perfectly explicit that he might well not have done this if only he had been able to speak to her and consult her and take her advice. This is completely startling to me, and I had no idea when I started the book that I would find that.
- Speaker #1
Well, again, Robert Harris is our guest today. The wonderful book. Precipice is available now. Robert Harris, you and I are talking in October. In November of this year, the wonderful book Conclave is going to be released as a film coming out here very soon. Congratulations on that work. I'm sure you're excited about it. Tell us a little bit about it and give us a sense as to what's next for Precipice. Is that on the horizon for film? Because it just, it lends itself so much to a cinematic approach.
- Speaker #2
Well, We're very lucky if anyone makes a film of it of the quality that they've just made of Conclave. That book came out eight years ago and it's taken a long time. But now there's some times with these things the stars align. And it's got a great director, Edward Berger, who directed All Quiet on the Western Front. A brilliant script. And a terrific cast, notably Ralph Fiennes, who plays the central figure of the dean of the College of Cardinals, who has to organize a conclave to elect a new pope after the old pope dies. And the novel and the film take place over a space of about 48, 72 hours, when all the cardinals, 100 or more, are locked into the Sistine Chapel and aren't let out until they've elected a new pope. And there's also Stanley Tucci is in it, John Lithgow. Isabella Rossellini. And it's great. I mean, it is a really good film. And I'm glad that the early buzz about it is so strong. It's a kind of dream. I think Precipice, you know, the new novel would make a good movie. I never write a novel thinking, oh, could sell this for a film or I never have an actor in mind or anything like that. I think that would be fatal. You know, you have to write for the reader and tell your story. It would work because it describes an arc of development of a relationship between these two characters, the Prime Minister and Venetia, and this third man investigating it. So it would make a good film, but whether it would be made, I don't know. I mean, I'm fortunate. I've had quite a lot of things, films made in my work, but you never know is the truth.
- Speaker #1
Well, we're starting to see here in the US lots of advertising, promotion, trailers for Conclave. Congratulations. And I think that's going to be. Wonderful. I think it's going to be a huge hit. And my best to you on precipice. That's just taking off as well. I certainly enjoyed it. I just have one final wrap up question for you. We have a national election here in the US between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. I wonder if you see any parallels, certainly with what's going on on the personal attacks from one candidate to the other with what happened with Prime Minister Asquith and Venetia Stanley. Any similarities strike you about the times? No. Well,
- Speaker #2
1914 was a very crucial year in the world's history, obviously, and it began with everything looking relatively peaceful and it ended with Europe in a state of absolute collapse and of course eventually America joined as well. This blew up out of nowhere and I suppose the lesson from 1914 is how quickly small isolated crises can suck in. an entire country, and you don't expect it. And obviously, there are two huge potential flashpoints at the moment in the Ukraine and in the Middle East. And who's to say we may only be a week away in either event from serious involvement by America and my country, Britain and NATO in one or other of them? It's perfectly possible. And this takes place against the backdrop of an election. And I feel that November 2024... is in its way as crucial a month as August 1914, potentially. There are lots of flashpoints there. But I have to say also, I remain an optimist. And I think that we're an adaptable species and our instinct for all the dispute is in the end to cooperate. So I hope that that's what will in the end happen in America with this election.
- Speaker #1
Well, thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you so much for your generous time. Again, congratulations on... Precipice. Robert Harris has been our guest today. The new movie Conclave will be out in November. We're going to have links so that our audience can find out more information about Precipice and Conclave and Robert Harris and all of his great work. But I guess selfishly, I'll just put you right here on the spot and just say, as you develop more work, Robert Harris, we'd love to have you back because I know.
- Speaker #2
I'd love to come back. It's been a terrific talking to you. Thank you so much for having me on. And from sunny Berkshire in Southern England, I bid you farewell in sunny Virginia.
- Speaker #1
Thank you so much, Robert Harris. Congrats on this book. We are excited for you.
- Speaker #2
Thank you so much.
- Speaker #1
My thanks to Robert Harris for joining us today in his generous time. Please check out his new book, Precipice. You can find links in our show notes. And in November, check out the new film, Conclave Base. on the Robert Harris novel. My thanks to our executive producer, Sam Henniger, for his work in making the show all come together. My thanks to you, our wonderful audience here on radio and podcast. Please be well, be safe, and let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show on radio and podcast. Thanks, everybody. We will see you next week.
- Speaker #0
Thanks for joining us this week on The Not Old Better Show. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows. simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep dive into some of the most fascinating real life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about better, the Not Old Better Show.
- Speaker #1
Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold-better.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations. to find out more about The Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is notoldbetter, and we're on Instagram at notoldbetter2. The Not Old Better Show is a production. of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better, the not old better show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.
