This is the story of three fascinating and strong-willed individuals: H.H. Asquith, Prime Minister of England; his friend and confidant, Edwin Samuel Montagu, a Jewish member of the Cabinet, and also Secretary of State for India; and the third, the sexually liberated Venetia Stanley, a brilliant adnd politically sophisticated woman and a member of one of England's oldest aristocratic families.

This book is also a recital of racism and anti-semitism in England in the early century - not merely among the uneducated or the lunatic fringe of the Tory Party, but amoing the well-educated, the stars of Oxford and Cambridge, and the leaders of the Liberal Party as well. It demonstrates that even so educated and affluent a man as Montagu, almost totally assimilated, who spent a life time trying to escape his Judaism, who married a woman who had nothing but scorn for all religions - was not immune from the pain and humiliation of anti-semitism.