This is the story of three 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 of India; and the third, the sexually liberated Venetia Stanley; a brilliant and politically sophisticated woman and a member of one of England's oldest aristocratic families. This story is primarily told through the life and letters of Edwin Montagu, with the letters of Asquith and Venetia Stanley adding to the picture. Marital infidelity; politics, war, empire, religion - these several factors all played a part in the Montagu-Asquith-Stanley triangle. Because Asquith and Montagu were deeply involved in the politics of their time, the book of necessity is as much a history of Britain on the verge of its imperial decline. Naomi Levine argues that the feelings attitudes, loves, hates and values (or lack of them) of individual men and women often influence history as much or more than the macroforces that are usually credited with directing history. The 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 among 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 lifetime 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.